Explicit And Implicit Studies Of Sense Of Military Honor And Dedication

Objectives:Military sense of honor and dedication are of great significance to the improvement of fighting capacity.At present,the research on the military sense of honor and dedication only measures the direct explicit attitude using paper-pencil Likert questionnaires,which are far from perfect.In addition,studies suggested that direct measurement was susceptible to social desirability.Compared with Likert questionnaire,semantic difference scale has better reliability and validity.However,no research about sense of honor and dedication semantic difference scale has been reported so far.Implicit measurement can effectively decrease the measurement error brought by social desirability.However,there is also no implicit study on sense of honor and dedication among military personnel.To address these gaps,this study complied two semantic differential scales for the military sense of honor and dedication respectively as the explicit attitude measurement tools and evaluated their reliability and validity.Moreover,the single category implicit association test was constructed for indirectly measuring the sense of honor and dedication to testify whether the implicit tests had good predictive validity.Methods:An unstructured questionnaire,a modern Chinese dictionary,and a Chinese Emotional material database were employed to collect materials.After the preliminary arrangement,the valence and familiarity of materials were evaluated by Grassroot officers and soldiers,and then the suitability of materials was assessed by specialists and professors.Finally,the materials were used to compile semantic differential scales and the single category implicit association test.In the explicit study,semantic differential scales of military sense of honor and dedication were compiled with materials had been assessed by specialists and professors,and the reliability and validity of the scales were explored by confirmatory factor analysis and correlation analysis,respectively,and predictivity of the sense of honor and dedication was evaluated through regression analysis.In the implicit study,the single category implicit association test for the military sense of honor and dedication was constructed according to the paradigm outlined by Karpinski and the reliability and validity of tow implicit association tests were examined in this part.Therefore,the predictive validities of explicit and implicit measurements were examined by binary logistic regression.Results:Collected form a wide range of sources and with rigorous evaluation procedure,the materials in military sense of honor and dedication database were reliable and can provide material support for the further research on sense of honor and dedication among military personnel.The results of confirmatory factor analysis of the military semantic differential scale of honor and dedication showed that the model fit was acceptable,and the results of correlation analysis suggested the scales had good internal consistency reliability,test-test reliability and criterion related validity.However,the results were susceptible to social desirability.In the military single category implicit association tests for the sense of honor and dedication,the results were robust,and the internal consistency reliability was satisfactory.Therefore,excellent military recruits could be sorted out according to the evaluation of their sense of honor and dedication.Conclusion:In conclusion,the semantic difference scales and single category implicit tests of military sense of honor and dedication have shown good reliability and validity and can be used to assess the military personnel’s sense of honor and dedication.However,compared with explicit measurement,the results of implicit measurements are more reliable and more suitable for the selection of excellent military personnel,and it also provide effective tools for human-post matching in the future.