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The purpose of the present article is to propose an alternative short form for the 199-item Arizona Life History Battery (ALHB), which we are calling the K-SF-42, as it contains 42 items as compared with the 20 items of the Mini-K, the short form that has been in greatest use for the past decade. These 42 items were selected from the ALHB, unlike those of the Mini-K, making direct comparisons of the relative psychometric performance of the two alternative short forms a valid and instructive exercise. A series of secondary data analyses were performed upon a recently completed five-nation cross-cultural survey, which was originally designed to assess the role of life history strategy in the etiology of interpersonal aggression. Only data from the ALHB that were collected in all five cross-cultural replications were used for the present analyses. The single immediate objective of this secondary data analysis was producing the K-SF-42 such that it would perform optimally across all five cultures sampled, and perhaps even generalize well to other modern industrial societies not currently sampled as a result of the geographic breadth of those included in the present study. A novel method, based on the use of the Cross-Sample Geometric Mean as a criterion for item selection, was used for generating such a cross-culturally valid short form. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this article is to examine the relations between two approaches to the measurement of life history (LH) strategies: A traditional approach, termed here the biodemographic approach, measures developmental characteristics like birthweight, gestation length, interbirth intervals, pubertal timing, and sexual debut, and a psychological approach measures a suite of cognitive and behavioral traits such as altruism, sociosexual orientation, personality, mutualism, familial relationships, and religiosity. The biodemographic approach also tends not to invoke latent variables, whereas the psychological approach typically relies heavily upon them. Although a large body of literature supports both approaches, they are largely separate. This review examines the history and relations between biodemographic and psychological measures of LH, which remain murky at best. In doing so, we consider basic questions about the nature of LH strategies: What constitutes LH strategy (or perhaps more importantly, what does not constitute LH strategy)? What is gained or lost by including psychological measures in LH research? Must these measures remain independent or should they be used in conjunction as complementary tools to test tenets of LH theory? Although definitive answers will linger, we hope to catalyze an explicit discussion among LH researchers and to provoke novel research avenues that combine the strengths each approach brings to this burgeoning field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]