Comparison of life history strategy measures

Life History Strategy (LHS) describes a cluster of evolved traits whose adaptive function is to facilitate an organism's reproduction. Individuals who allocate more resources towards somatic and parental/nepotistic effort and less towards mating effort are described as slow life history strategists, while those with the opposite resource allocation pattern are described as fast life history strategists. There are many measures purported to measure individual differences in LHS, however these have not yet been systematically compared. In this paper we compare the Arizona Life History Battery (ALHB), Mini-K, High-K Strategy Scale, and two Super-K Factors and test the internal consistency or measurement model structure of each measure, and the convergent validity between the measures. We found all measures show adequate internal consistency and measurement model structure and in general, the ALHB, Mini-K, and one Super-K Factor show the strongest convergence between the measures. Implications are discussed. © 2013 Elsevier Ltd.