Air Force Occupational Attitude Inventory Development

This report describes the development of the operational version of the Air Force Occupational Attitude Inventory (OAI). The original OAI of 55 life history, 11 work history, and 348 specific job attitude statements was administered to 3,100 airmen to validate the 35 hypothesized job attitude dimensions used in development of the OAI and reduce the inventory to a minimum subset of items capturing the domain of job attitude variance measured by the full set of 348 items. Principal components factor analysis and varimax rotation resulted in identification of 35 job attitude facets which were markedly different from the hypothesized facets and from job satisfaction factors traditionally found in civilian literature. Because of skewed rectangular response distributions, the 8-point scale was revised to add a neutral point. The inventory was reduced to 200 attitudinal items using a computing algorithm titled VARSEL and then readministered to a 10,000-case sample. Items were refactored and original empirical factors were validated, resulting in a conclusion that civilian and military personnel have different perspectives of their work environment and thus established that civilian job satisfaction inventories have limited utility in the military setting. (Author)