The Today's Army Spouse Panel Proof-of-Concept Study: Methodological Report
Abstract
Army leadership and program staff often need timely survey data from a representative sample of Army families to inform policy decisions or to better understand the scope of issues or concerns among Army families. However, timely, representative survey data on Army families is not readily available from U.S. Department of Defense or civilian sources. One way to obtain this type of information is through a panel of representative Army spouses who have agreed to participate in short, on-demand surveys examining topics relevant for Army decision-making. This type of survey panel, called an access panel, conveys several benefits over other types of surveys. For one, panel participants can be randomly sampled from the target population to be representative of specific characteristics of that larger population. In addition, having a group of participants willing to participate in surveys enables researchers to efficiently and quickly collect data from participants who have already been recruited through rigorous methods. Researchers can statistically adjust the data to make population-level inferences and provide a timely report of survey results to inform decision-making. Our research team capitalized on the Todays Army Spouse Survey (TASS), a 2018 representative survey of Army spouses, to create the Todays Army Spouse Survey Panel (TASP), an operational proof of concept of an access panel of Army spouses for short, on-demand surveys. In this report, we evaluate the effectiveness of the TASP in recruiting participants and providing timely information representative of the relevant population. The panel incorporated a probability-based sample that was originally randomly sampled from a known population (Army spouses whose soldier was stationed in the continental United States in 2018, based on personnel records), and panel participants were recruited through the resulting survey (a practice called piggybacking).
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Jan 17, 2023
- Accession Number
- AD1190624
Entities
People
- Carra S. Sims
- Michael S. Pollard
- Owen Hall
- Thomas E Trail
Organizations
- RAND Corporation