Unreliability and Error in the Military's “Gold Standard” Measure of Sexual Harassment by Education and Gender

Abstract

The Department of Defense's “gold standard” sexual harassment measure, the Sexual Harassment Core Measure (SHCore), is based on an earlier measure that was developed primarily in college women. Furthermore, the SHCore requires a reading grade level of 9.1. This may be higher than some troops' reading abilities and could generate unreliable estimates of their sexual harassment experiences. Results from 108 male and 96 female soldiers showed that the SHCore's temporal stability and alternate-forms reliability was significantly worse (a) in soldiers without college experience compared to soldiers with college experience and (b) in men compared to women. For men without college experience, almost 80% of the temporal variance in SHCore scores was attributable to error. A plain language version of the SHCore had mixed effects on temporal stability depending on education and gender. The SHCore may be particularly ill suited for evaluating population trends of sexual harassment in military men without college experience.

Keywords:

• military personnel
• sexual harassment
• satisficing
• reliability
• questionnaires
• test construction
• plain language
• educational attainment

Acknowledgments

Funding for this study was provided by the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Health Services Research and Development (HSR&D) Service (IIR 96-014). Drs. Murdoch, Griffin, and Polusny are core investigators for the Center for Chronic Disease Outcomes Research (CCDOR). CCDOR is a VA HSR&D Service Center of Excellence. The authors thank two anonymous reviewers for their helpful critiques. The views, opinions, and findings are the authors' and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Departments of Veterans Affairs or Defense.

Notes

1. The 12-item SHCore had a correlation of .96 with the Department of Defense's original SEQ version. The 16-item SHCore-PL had a correlation of .96 with the 31-item plain language SEQ version. Analyses of the Department of Defense's full SEQ version and its plain language counterpart are available on request and essentially mirror the results reported here.