Youth and Influencer Polls
The Military Services must attract talented young men and women -bright, task focused, self-starters who can handle the growing complexity of military systems and operations and who have the character and values to put service before self. Efforts to recruit these young people are typically challenging due to a variety of factors such as a strong economy, low unemployment rates, and the tendency for increasing numbers of high school graduates matriculate directly to college.
Market research and recruiting experience has shown that the perceptions of young people concerning military service have an impact on recruiting. Since 2001, DoD has conducted quick turn-around polls of both youth and the adults who influence them to capture data on transitory youth attitudes, capitalizing on young people's reactions to what is happening now and judging their reactions to on-going marketing efforts and conditions. These polls allow DoD to collect "real time" information about the attitudes of youth and adult influencers toward the military and those world-wide events that might affect force utilization. This facilitates the design of effective recruitment advertising campaigns and the establishment of attractive enlistment incentives. The polls also provide senior DoD officials with input to recruiting policy issues and with empirical justification to Congress for recruiting budgets.
Under this project, HumRRO is conducting the Youth and Influencer Polls in the spring and fall of 2008, with an option to conduct one or both of the polls two additional times in 2009. The sampling frame for the polls utilizes a list-assisted, random-digit-dialed (RDD) telephone sample approach and is stratified to facilitate modest oversampling of minority populations. All interviews will be administered by telephone using computer-assisted telephone interviewing (CATI). Households are screened for youth age 16 to 21. Upon completion of a youth interview, a parent of that youth will also be interviewed where possible. Households without age-eligible youth are screened for an adult, age 22 to 85, who is in a position to influence the post-high-school decisions of a youth age 12 to 21. HumRRO is also responsible for processing the poll data, delivering weighted data files, and producing reports summarizing the results, along with analyzing trends over time.
