全球智库信息集成服务系统

• Power imbalances and career influence over students in occupational training pipelines may increase the risk for abuse and misconduct.
• Without confidentiality, the survey will lose its value in promoting visibility of behaviors that students are not willing to reveal through official reporting channels.

The survey system needs to address diverse occupational training pipelines

• Pipeline length can range from a few weeks to more than a year.
• Pipelines may require training at one, two, or several installations.
• Some training is run by the other branches of the military.
• Courses may have many students or only a few.
• In some courses, newly enlisted airmen train alongside officers and/or enlisted airmen with greater tenure.

There are two primary options for survey administration

• One option is administering the survey at a single point, capturing a snapshot of all technical training or flying training students at that time.
• The second option is connecting the administration of the survey to the training pipeline itself (e.g., by surveying students at the end of the awarding course).
• Both census (entire population) and sampling approaches have strengths and limitations.
• The survey must ask students about specific behaviors to jog their memories and to avoid problems stemming from differing understandings of terms, such as "hazing" and "sexual harassment."
• If not managed properly, differences in pipelines could lead to misleading comparisons of incident rates.
• Software and computers will need to be updated to support a survey tailored to different types of students dispersed across a wide array of training locations.

Initial skills training provides incoming officers and enlisted airmen with the basic knowledge and skills necessary to be awarded their Air Force occupational specialty. For many students, it is a developmental period during which they are transitioning into the responsibilities of adulthood, and they enter as the newest Air Force members at the lowest levels of the officer and enlisted hierarchies. They are seeking admission into career fields for which they must prove their capability, and, in some cases, they must compete for limited positions in their subspecialties. For these reasons, these technical training and flying training students may be particularly vulnerable to abuse and misconduct from one another and from those who have authority over them.

To help prevent potential abuse and misconduct during this vulnerable period, the commander of the Air Force's Air Education and Training Command (AETC) asked RAND researchers to adapt AETC's survey system for monitoring abuse and misconduct in Basic Military Training to extend it to the technical training and flying training environments. Data from the proposed survey system may also provide insights into potential cultural or systemic changes that could help reduce the occurrence of abuse and misconduct and increase reporting when it does occur.

This report provides background on the structure of these training environments, revisions to tailor the basic military training survey content to apply to students in these environments, survey pretest results, strategies to promote open and honest participation, and recommendations for future use.

• Chapter One

  Introduction

• Part I

  Understanding Technical Training and Flying Training

  • Chapter Two

    Characteristics of the Technical Training Environment

  • Chapter Three

    Characteristics of the Flying Training Environment

• Part II

  Adapting and Pretesting the Survey Content and Administration

  • Chapter Four

    Adapted and New Survey Content

  • Chapter Five

    Survey Pretest Methods

• Part III

  Survey System Recommendations

  • Chapter Six

    When to Administer the Survey

  • Chapter Seven

    Who Should Participate in the Survey

  • Chapter Eight

    Confidentiality and Maximizing Survey Participation

  • Chapter Nine

    Technical and Human Resource Challenges to Resolve Before Implementing the Survey System

  • Chapter Ten

    Recommendations for Analyses and Reporting

  • Chapter Eleven

    Conclusion

• Appendix A

  Air Force and DoD Surveys That Assess Misconduct

• Appendix B

  Enlisted Occupational Specialties Available to Non-Prior Service Students

• Appendix C

  Survey Instrument

• Appendix D

  Responsible Comparisons of Survey Results