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Participants
Participants in this study consisted of 257 active-duty military members from all five branches of service. There were 98 females and 159 males (Figure 2). Of the 257 participants, there were 99 officers, and 158 enlisted personnel (Figure 3). The sample includes responses from 146 Air Force members, 63 sailors, 20 Marines, 19 Coast Guardsmen, and nine soldiers (Figure 1). There were 171 stateside participants, 70 overseas participants, and 16 participants were forward deployed (Figure 4).
Instrument
The questionnaire consisted of 13 closed-ended questions designed to identify the most frequently used military news medium (Appendix B). The request had a 10-day response time.
The first five questions of the survey were demographic information. Question 6 was a yes/no question of Internet use. Questions 7 through 10 solicited the frequency of mediums with five answer choices: daily/weekly/monthly/never/don't have. The final three questions ranked the reliance on newspaper/radio/television/Internet mediums, for internal military information.
Procedure
An email survey was distributed using a snowball convenience sample of military personnel. Personnel were sent the questionnaire with a request to forward the survey to other military members. The resulting sample includes some public affairs professionals, but the majority of the sample was comprised of non-public affairs personnel.
Analysis
The data collected for the study was analyzed using SPSS. All survey were entered into the computer program to derive descriptive statistics for each question. In addition, measures of central tendency for questions were examined. Finally, cross-tabs were computed to analyze specific characteristics of the data on each response.
Rationale & Research Questions | Results | Discussion | References | Appendix