Family Factors Affecting Retention

This project was designed to improve the understanding and modeling of the decisions, made each year by thousands of first-term soldiers, to reenlist in the Army or to leave for civilian jobs and school. A model of the reenlistment decision formulated from a decision-analytic perspective was developed, based on an extensive review of the literature in the areas of military personnel, job satisfaction and job change, and decision theory, as well as from focus groups conducted with first-term soldiers at Fort Benning, Georgia. A multicomponent decision-modeling approach incorporating attitudinal, normative, and affective predictors of reenlistment intent was then developed, along with a set of instruments to capture data on these components. Consistent with previous findings for an enlistment task, the analysis of the pilot test data indicated that the three components predicted reenlistment intent in the following rank order: affect, attitudinal, and normative. The results also suggest that the Army has available tools for influencing these reenlistment decisions that are much more varied than the limited set of mainly economic factors that are now predominant in these programs. Specifically, the affective component dominated the economic variables in predicting reenlistment intent for this limited sample of soldiers, and may be an important reenlistment program and policy lever in the future. Keywords: Military personnel, Retention.

This compendium is one of a series of social science research and teaching resources created by the American Family Data Archive at Sociometrics Corporation. It describes 28 data sets chosen by a panel of scientist-experts as having outstanding potential for secondary data analysis on issues facing today’s American family.