Assessment of Commitment to Equal Opportunity Goals in the Military

The purpose of this study was to contrast two methods of assessing commitment to equal opportunity (EO) goals. Students training at the Defense Equal Opportunity Management Institute (DEOMI) to be military EO advisors were the subjects of the study. The validity and reliability of DEOMI's measure of EO commitment, the Interpersonal Skills Development Evaluation (ISDE), were assessed. Slides were used to present cue words associated with various categories, including EO issues (e.g., discrimination and racism), to the DEOMI students. The students rated their association of these cue words with their current concerns and the emotional arousal evoked (two variables related to goal commitment; cf. Klinger, 1988). Students were then asked to recall as many of these words as they could. Although the ratings and the free-recall scores for the EO words were correlated with each other (support for the word-rating approach to measuring EO commitment), they were not significantly correlated with students' ISDE ratings. Other problems of validity and reliability for the ISDE are discussed.