A Comparison of Biodemographic and Psychosocial Dimensions of Life History Theory in Incarcerated Offenders and Men in Dangerous Professions
Description
The data files submitted here are related to the research, in which we compared psychosocial and biodemographic indicators of life history strategies of incarcerated offenders (N=84) and men in dangerous professions (N=117) working as firefighters (N =85, the first 85 items in the dataset) and soldiers (N =32, the last 32 items in the dataset). We hypothesized that there would be differences in life history strategies employed by these two groups of subjects and we also expected that biodemographic and psychosocial life history indicators used in the study would correlate with each other as, according to life history theory, they are reflections of one consistent life history strategy. We used two questionnaires: the Mini-K used to assess psychosocial aspects of life history strategy and the questionnaire we created to measure biodemographic life history variables such as age of the subjects’ parents at the appearance of their first child, number of biological siblings and step-siblings, intervals between subsequent mother’s births, age at sexual onset, having children, age of becoming a father, number of offspring, number of women with whom the subjects have children and life expectancy. The research on the inmates took place in medium-security correctional institution. Firefighters and soldiers participated in the study in their workplaces. All subjects were completing questionnaires in a paper-and-pencil version. Participation was voluntary and anonymous. The results showed that the inmates tended to employ faster life history strategies than men in dangerous professions, but this regularity only emerged in relation to biodemographic variables. There were no intergroup differences in the context of psychosocial indicators of LH strategy measured by the Mini-K. Moreover, the overall correlation between the biodemographic and psychosocial LH indicators used in this study was weak. Thus, in our study biodemographic indicators seemed to reliably reflect life history strategies of the subjects, in contrast to psychosocial variables. All statistical analysis was performed using SPSS and Statistica. Raw data as well as encoded data in SPSS format are attached.