Developing an Army Market Research Index in Support of Army Recruiting

摘要

A strong economy in recent years has increased the challenge that Army recruiters face in obtaining sufficient enlistees to meet force requirements. In order to continue to meet recruiting goals, the Army must understand youth perceptions and how youth make decisions about whether to join the Army. Generating appropriate market research for the Army requires first cataloguing the existing market research databases and identifying the critical questions that are not answered by current research. This effort identified existing databases that have information about youth and parent attitudes and developed a searchable electronic catalogue of these databases. For each of 64 databases identified, researchers acquired information such as the sample size, demographics of the subject population, the type of variables in the research, frequency of data collection, cost of obtaining the data, and point of contact information. An index was created that can be searched either using 17 relevant search categories or by a user-defined key word search. Recommendations for future research directions are discussed.