Sexual Harrasment In The Navy Essay, Research Paper

After the Tailhook Scandal the Navy felt as if they needed to do something. The navy implemented a program to train military and civilian personnel about Sexual Harassment. The training was to teach naval personnel the meaning of sexual Harassment and ways to avoid it. It also set up courses for the new recruits promoting a sense of teamwork and gender equality.

How would I assess the effectiveness of this program? If I were in that position I would probably use the pretest-posttest or the case study approach, because they are the easiest to implement with such a large group as the Navy. In the case study approach I would look at the performance and positive interaction between genders after the lecture compared to before the lecture and see if there is much or any change. The downfall to this method is that observation is the major tool for evaluating and this could be persuaded by bias especially in the Navy. In the pretest posttest approach the evaluation may be a little more reliable, but there is still a problem interpreting the result. I would measure the group cohesiveness before and after the program to see if anything has changed the problem with this is the Hawthorne effect. I would choose these over the controlled group evaluations because I would want everyone to go through the program no matter what.

How would I ensure positive change in the Navy? After the training program I would set up a criterion to ensure that positive change occurs. I would find a set of criterion that would be a balance between Criterion relevance, Criterion deficiency, and Criterion contamination. This would set the pace for the military personnel in the Navy. This is the only way to continually reinforce the goals set forth in the training program.

After doing a training program evaluating the effectiveness of the program and setting forth a criterion for it implementation I would feel strongly about the direction in which the navy was headed. I hope that one-day sexual harassment will be a thing of the past and both men and women can work hand in hand to protect our country.