Measuring the Cohesion of Military Communities

Abstract

Several trends affecting the military make the cohesion of installations increasingly problematic. At the same time, recent work in military sociology contends that greater attention should be paid to the integration of military units within the larger social entities that contain them. We report the results of a pretest conducted among 325 military personnel and spouses at an East Coast air base to construct a measure of base cohesion. A principal components analysis yields two relatively stable and independent dimensions from the 50 Likert items we constructed. These reliable scales correlate well with measures of work unit cohesion and with a measure of neighborhood cohesion (especially among respondents in neighborhoods that are an extension of the base). They also correlate as well or better than work unit cohesion with measures of extension and retention.