Navy Wives' Views on the Reenlistment Decision: Reasons for and Reasons against

摘要

This study is part of a project aimed at producing an automated system for helping Naval enlisted personnel carefully consider their decision about whether to reenlist. As part of this project, conversations were held with each of 99 Naval enlisted persons to discover the reasons that weighted for and against reenlistment. In the course of these conversation it became clear that the opinions of spouses (usually wives because 90% of the participants were male and 50% were currently married), were extremely important in the decisions. Often, however, it appears that the participants were less able to articulate their spouses' concerns than they were their own, even through they said that their spouses' concerns were exerting an influence upon the decisions. In light of this, it seemed prudent to see if the spouses' concerns were similar to those of the participants; if they were not, it would be necessary to design the decision aiding system to take the dissimilarities into account and to provide a way to give spouses' concerns appropriate influence in the decision process. Groups of Navy Wives were asked to identify the reasons that argued for and against reenlistment by their spouses. This report describes the responses to that request. In spite of many reasons that argue against reenlistment, the wives were strongly supportive of reenlistment.