Hmm, interesting. I would think you would need a relatively focused population and also a much narrower question. What are you hoping to get at? For the purposes of discussion, let me point out some subtleties (which you've doubtless thought of but may perhaps be useful in starting off an ultimately productive discussion).

How do you distinguish patience, which I see as a mostly positive quality, from expectations imposed by culture or history? Middle-class teenagers in the US used to be, on average, much more patient about waiting until marriage for sex, or waiting years for a loved one to come home from the war before marriage. I wouldn't say that patient is exactly the right word here, but if your data set didn't take history into account it might seem that way.

How do you distinguish patience from cultural expectations of how long things take? My experience in France and Italy was that certain basic bureaucratic procedures simply Take. Much. Longer. To. Accomplish. Getting a sim card for a cell phone can take an hour and that's in a major city. Everyone puts up with it. I wouldn't say these are, on the whole, patient societies. In between and often during waiting (why not?) people like to yell a lot.

How do you distinguish patience from pessimism, or simply being resigned? (if you were e.g. to look at speeches given by charismatic Christian preachers in the American south over the course of this century and track whether and when they promised the coming of the Messiah)

I also think patience is affected by the expectation of an end result, and by one's feeling of involvement with the process. I don't mind waiting several months to get reimbursed for something if I fully expect it will happen, whereas I am much less patient with situations in flux.

I think Emily is right that this field of inquiry is too wide... This is a case where finding a way to laser-focus on one revealing data stream to the exclusion of all else will yeild the most trustable insights. Less is more, as they say.

Looking at marriage rates seems like a potentially interesting avenue... there is hard data about this sort of thing, and patience is clearly a factor. There is definitely a lot of cross-breeze from other cultural influences, but it strikes me as a relatively clean way to approach the question.

Things like waiting in lines are not as good... in such cases the frame swamps out the small effects that you would hope to measure.

Really, though, one has to focus on what the subjects are being patient about. I have certain peeves that make me instantly turn bright red and explode; on the other hand I have an almost unnatural patience in other areas, and a spectrum in between.

For trivial, attention span sorts of measure, I might suggest looking at data about the frequency of channel changes in TV viewing. Again, nice hard data; very little cross-influence. But the question remains: What does it tell you?

I would start by trying to form a theory of the realms of patience. Questions of marriage might be seen as on the 'big deal' side of the spectrum, whereas 'channel surfing' would be viewed on the 'trivial' side... There may be more meaningful ways to dissect it. Once You have a working model for the areas of life in which patience may be applied, you have a fighting chance of finding meaningful anecdotal indications in the data.

The best way would be to find old research that tested patience in some way, and replicate the tests with contemporary subjects. This is sure to give you the most unpolluted results. Even if the original research had questionable aims(and let's face it, psych research is as squishy as it gets), you will at least get a hard data set if you follow the same steps.

Good comments. Context is everything, and I gave too little to focus discussion. Perhaps I should have motivated and focused things more, but I wanted to cast the question kind of wide to catch different perspectives.
This issue of patience is difficult stuff, and for me goes in a million different directions..
My immediate trigger was Sheila Bair (FDIC retiring head) article in the Wash Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/our-focus-on-the-short-term-is-holding-the-economy-back/2011/07/06/gIQAw3cI4H_story.html
which talks about the use of short-term thinking vs long-term thinking,and impulse versus patience, as the cause of financial woes big and small . Example: short-term approaches for qtrly earnings reports, and in general the focus on short-term rewards over investments with delayed payoff. This is not a novel idea of course.

I was also thinking of the Stanford marshmallow experiment which is referenced at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deferred_gratification, where children who were rewarded for delaying the gratification of eating a marshmallow were rewarded with eating two, and those who deferred, it is asserted, were described by others years later as being more competent, and got higher SAT scores.
I was also thinking that patience, like "trust" or other attributes of the mind we use,  as being something that is in some way measurable, as I have read that brain scans showed lower  levels of trust in East European countries than in the West. Related is http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/4397269.stm  and more on interpreting  fMRI  at  http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=five-ways-brain-scans-mislead-us.
Or measurable in terms of behavior.of individuals or groups.

Let me be more concise. If patience or lack thereof  (and by implication growing levels of impatience in the general population over , say, the last few decades) is cited to be a cause of financial woes or a cause of anything else then it seems we need a way to measure that (singly or for groups) and be able to use such measurements in a predictive model.
If a general rise in impatience could be documented, or the converse, another question then is why.
I was also thinking of patience over time frames of less than a second to several minutes.More on the channel surfing short term end of things, than on the delayed marriage end of the spectrum, perhaps because I was thinking that short-term patience/impatience would then be more in accord with my intuitive notions about impatience/patience .being a state of mind associated with a  particular feeling.

Now, there is the essential issue of what is meant by the terms "patience", "impulsive" and the like.  It can be used as a tautology in a way-- " well she quit waiting in line because she grew impatient" to which could be replied "impatience in this situation is simply defined by her getting out of line after x time"- which may or may not be adequate.. But most people are asserting that there is a mental state she was in - impatience-  that preceded and was the cause of her getting out of line.

I'll try to return. Mindfulness in individuals and in society. Economic definition of value. Schools of fish. Expectation and patience. Media and the mind (or brain if you like) and patience.
Accelerated societal change, twitter, self-location, authenticity. The kitchen sink. Patience related to persistence and other attributes.
Self-location. Ted Kacinsky.



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