"The Army has assembled an archive of survey data for use in studies and analyses on practical issues pertinent to the career decisions of officers. This effort applied the analog approach for empirically deriving and validating measures in order to expand the value of the archive for longitudinal research on organizational commitment. Accordingly, an expert panel selected 13 questionnaire items that fit with the content domains of Meyer and Allen's (1991) affective commitment (AC) and continuance commitment (CC). It was expected that the average of responses to the items selected for a construct could serve as an analog scale for measuring the construct. To test this, the original Meyer and Allen items and the candidate analog items were administered to 404 Army officers. Confirmatory factor analyses showed that responses to the analog and original items defined dimensions representing AC and CC. Correlations of analog scale scores with rank and career intent were also similar to those obtained for the original scales. Use of the validated analog scales links findings from the Army archive to the wider research on organizational commitment and increases the certainty and applicability of these findings."--DTIC.

Most military researchers who have attempted to measure organizational commitment have done so on an ad hoc basis, preferring to invent new items and scales rather than incorporate well-established measures. The purpose of this special issue is to reverse this trend by bringing military organizational commitment research into the scientific mainstream and to do so in ways that will prove useful to military services while advancing organizational commitment theory and knowledge. This special issue grew out of a symposium conducted at the 1998 American Psychological Association Convention that arose when many in the field recognized the practical importance of measuring organizational commitment while maintaining a healthy concern for ensuring that this measurement was well-grounded in organizational commitment theory. Taken together, the articles in this issue demonstrate the concepts of affective and continuance commitment and their underlying measures by using them in different military samples and under a variety operational conditions.

The Baseline Officer Longitudinal Data Set (BOLDS) was developed jointly by the U.S. Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences (ARI) and the U.S. Military Academy (USMA) to enable researchers to study the development of leader performance over time. Currently, BOLDS consists of data accumulated on USMA cadets from the Class of 1998. The measures in the database represent ten broad dimensions relevant to leader development: cognitive aptitude, complex problem-solving skills, tacit knowledge of military leadership, temperament, motivation, leadership style, leadership performance, physical fitness, cognitive-emotional identity development, and developmental experiences. This report identifies all of the measures included in BOLDS and describes their psychometric properties. Such documentation is essential to facilitate utilization of the database and to inform future data collections, which are scheduled to track this officer cohort throughout their military careers and to expand BOLDS to officers from other commissioning sources.