Fight or flight? Behaviour and experiences of laypersons in the face of an incipient fire

This dataset contains raw data collected in an experimental study by the University of Muenster, Germany, in cooperation with the German Fire Protection Association and the State Fire Service Institute NRW, Germany. The study is part of a larger research project and examined the behavior of laypersons when confronted with an incipient fire.

Within minutes, an incipient fire can develop into a life-threatening full fire. Consequently, it should be fought as early as possible. But are laypersons capable of doing this? In such a situation, how do they behave and feel? These questions are addressed in the current study. Persons without any professional firefighting training (N=64) were confronted in two experimental runs with a real incipient fire in the form of a burning pillow.

The study was approved by the ethics committee of the Department 7 of the University of Münster (ID 2018-16-MT) and pre-registered with AsPredicted.org under the number 20436 (https://aspredicted.org/8py33.pdf). The study was supported by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (funding code FKZ 13N14208).

In addition to the raw data, the codebook as well as the R- analysis script is included here for better comprehensibility. The raw data contains only the information of persons who were included in the analysis and have agreed to it. Some demographic information was deleted to ensure anonymity.