Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment in the U.S. Military: Volume 5. Estimates for Installation- and Command-Level Risk of Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment from the 2014 RAND Military Workplace Study

Abstract

While the prevalence of sexual assault in the military has been estimated regularly for each of the services and for the service academies, it would be useful to know the rate of sexual assault and sexual harassment among personnel serving in individual military installations or commands. Such information could help identify the need for additional training or prevention efforts, educate leaders about problems in their commands, improve understanding of the organizational or environmental risk factors for sexual assault and harassment, and provide interpretational context for statistics that document the number of official reports of sexual assault at specific installations. Unfortunately, to be useful, estimates of sexual assault prevalence must be precise, which can pose a challenge when constructing estimates of an event that has a fairly low rate (e.g., less than 2 percent per year) in small groups.1 The goals of the current analyses are twofold: first, to establish whether statistical methods can be developed to produce sufficiently precise prevalence estimates to distinguish the risk profiles of military installations and commands, and, second, to use those methods to examine which installations, commands, or other groupings of service members are associated with especially high or low risk. Identification of installations with high or low risk may provide insights into patterns of risk across installations or shared characteristics of locations with abnormal risk profiles. In addition, estimates of risk at the installation and command levels provide important context for understanding rates of official reporting of sexual assaults collected by the Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office in the Office of the Secretary of Defense.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jan 01, 2018
Accession Number
AD1061349

Entities

People

  • Andrew Gelman
  • Andrew R Morral
  • Jessica Hwang
  • Matthew Cefalu
  • Terry L Schell

Organizations

  • RAND Corporation

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Biomedical
  • C4I
  • Ground and Sea Platforms
  • Human Systems

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Air Force
  • Databases
  • Information Science
  • Military Force Levels
  • Military Science
  • Military Training
  • Monte Carlo Method
  • Naval Operations
  • Naval Warfare
  • Navy
  • Personnel Management
  • Service Academies
  • Test And Evaluation
  • Unified Combatant Commands
  • United States Strategic Command
  • United States Transportation Command
  • Warfare

Readers

  • Organizational Psychology.
  • Theoretical Analysis.