Agency, Relatedness, Inner Peace, and Problem Solving in Sexual Offending

Abstract

Untreated imprisoned sexual offenders ( N = 42) completed interviews and questionnaires to establish the priority they assigned, at the time of their offending, to three “goods” from the good lives model and to gain insight into how they operationalized these goods at that time. The relationship between the priorities offenders assigned to the goods of (a) agency, (b) relatedness, and (c) inner peace at the time of offending and their problem-solving ability was also explored. A measure of problem-solving ability was obtained with the Social Problem-Solving Inventory—Revised, and a measure of functional and dysfunctional problem solving was obtained from its scales. The results suggest that sexual offenders tend to experience problems in prioritizing, rather than operationalizing, inner peace, as this good is not related to problem-solving ability but tends to be assigned lower priority than agency and relatedness. Although agency and relatedness tend to be given higher importance, and this is related to better problem-solving ability, there appear to be problems with scope in some offenders' good lives conceptions and problems with the capacity, means, and conflict among the means used to achieve these goods. Directions for future research are suggested.