Leveraging Existing Department of Defense Data Towards Optimized Individual and Team Performance in the Army Technical Report 2023-002 (DRAFT)

The U.S. Army, the nation's largest military organization, seeks a comprehensive understanding of how the physical, cognitive, and social traits of Soldiers shape their ability to navigate the challenges presented by a persistently conflicted world. This research endeavors to pinpoint specific social characteristics of Soldiers, defining and quantifying them through the analysis of administrative data collected by the Army and now available to researchers in the Army’s Person-Event Data Environment (PDE). The overarching goal is to evaluate the influence of these characteristics on both individual and unit performance. Drawing from the Army's extensive use of administrative and survey data, this paper provides a historical overview of individual performance assessment within the military. Additionally, it offers a comprehensive survey of the existing performance literature, culminating in the development of a conceptual framework. This framework serves as a foundation for subsequent quantitative and qualitative analyses, guiding the development of statistical models of Soldier and unit performance. The research identifies predictors and outcomes related to performance, concluding with a mixed model analysis that employs qualitative and natural language processing techniques. Findings reveal a consistency in the Army's descriptions of performance over time, underscoring persistent similarities in key social characteristics (e.g., a willingness to serve), despite an ever evolving set of specific task requirements. This study underscores the potential use of administrative data to measure performance and effectively connect it to meaningful outcomes, thereby contributing valuable insights to our broader understanding of performance and emphasizing the crucial role of social components in predicting performance outcomes.

Thurston J, Schroeder J, Ratcliff N, Lancaster V, Linehan K, Schroeder A, Goldstein J, Shipp S. Leveraging Existing Department of Defense Data Towards Optimized Individual and Team Performance in the Army. (DRAFT) Proceedings of the Biocomplexity Institute, Technical Report. #BI‐2022‐448. University of Virginia; 2023 December. DOI: https://doi.org/10.18130/ntvh-pn68.