Evaluating Military Advertising and Recruiting

It is anticipated that in the coming decade the Department of Defense (DoD) willfield and test new advertising and recruiting initiatives designed to improve therecruiting outlook. The DoD needs a comprehensive research and evaluation strategybased on sound research principles that will ensure valid, reliable, and relevant resultsto discover the most promising policies. The primary objective of this book is to helpthe DoD improve its research on advertising and recruiting policies.Evaluating Military Advertising and Recruiting: Theory and Methodology presents aframework for evaluation that links different types of research questions to variousresearch methodologies. The framework identifies four major categories of researchquestions and four broad methodological approaches. The first category of researchquestion asks "What does a target audience see as attractive or unattractive featuresof a program?" It is well suited to examination via qualitative methods, such as focusgroups, unstructured or open-ended surveys, and interviews. The second category ofresearch question asks "What is the effect of a program on specified attitudes orbehavioral intentions?" It is well suited to examination via surveys, experiments, andquasi experiments. The third category of research question asks "What is the effectof a proposed new program on enlistment?" It is well suited to examination viaexperiments and quasi experiments. The final category of research question asks"What is the effect of an existing program on enlistment?" It is well suited to examinationvia econometric modeling.Table of ContentsFront MatterExecutive Summary1. Introduction2. Theoretical Approaches3. Monitoring Trends in Youth Attitudes, Values, and Propensity4. Advertising Planning: Generative and Evaluative Approaches5. Determining Optimal Levels of Advertising and Recruiting Resources6. The Timing and Levels of Joint and Service-Specific Advertising7. Determining Optimal Types of Incentives8. Performance Management of Recruiters9. Conclusions and RecommendationsReferencesAppendix: Biographical SketchesIndex