Prison Sentence and Depression Levels

A proposal experiment developed in the spring of 2021 titled "Lifetime Prison Sentence and Levels of Depression" seeking to answer the research question, "Does the duration of a life sentence impact a prisoner’s level of depression?".

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Experimental Design

Beginning with participants (N= 400), 4 prisons will be chosen. From there 4 stratified samples are created (0-9 years, 10-19 years, 20-29 years, and life sentence) with 100 participants in each. Before inmates are accepted into the experiment, they must be admitted by a correctional officer, and then randomly chosen to be apart of the study through a randomizer. Ideally the same amount of participants from each prison are in each strata.

All participants go under the same procedures throughout the study. Researcher gives the assessment with a pen, then asks participants to answer as honestly as possible and returns on a 30 minute basis until completion.

Participants will respond to a 20 item self-report inventory. The inventory will be adapted from the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) and the Beck Hopelessness Scale. 10 items will be used from the BDI in which participants will be asked to rate symptoms and attitudes of depression on a scale of 0-3, best reflecting how they feel. The remaining 10 items will be from the Beck Hopelessness Scale, in which participants will respond with “true” or “false” to pessimistic and optimistic statements.

Data Analysis

Central tendency and measure of dispersion for length of incarceration and levels of depression will be obtained from analysis of quantitative data. An ANOVA or regression test will be conducted to determine where the differences are between the groups. To conclude the strength of the relationship between incarceration and depression we will use a regression line and correlational test to find out the strength of correlation. A t-test will be run on the assessment results to evaluate if a significant difference exists between our participants, incarcerated individuals, and the general public, individuals not currently incarcerated