EVALUATING CHARACTER STRENGTHS IN CADETS DURING A MILITARY FIELD EXERCISE: CONSISTENCY BETWEEN DIFFERENT EVALUATION SOURCES

Problem statement:
The Norwegian Military Academy (NMA) educates cadets who will serve as officers in international military operations. Serving as an officer in such operations is often demanding, and requires that the officer exhibit certain personal strengths and characteristics. Applying assumptions and formulations based on Peterson and Seligman’s (2004) taxonomy of 24 character strengths, prior studies have identified 12 character strengths that are particularly relevant and important for succeeding as an officer in the Norwegian army. The character strengths are: leadership, integrity, persistence, bravery, citizenship, fairness, open-mindedness, social intelligence, love of learning, perspective, self-regulation, and creativity. The NMA have launched a project to find ways of observing, evaluating and developing these character strengths during the cadets’ three-year bachelor’s program. Since no instruments for observing and evaluating character strengths in live contexts exist today, the NMA developed an observer-based instrument for evaluation of character strengths in military field exercises.

Purpose of study:
To examine the consistency in evaluations across raters when using an observer-based instrument designed to measure 12 vital character strengths in cadets during military field exercises. Method: 60 cadets from the NMA attending a 5-day military field exercise were evaluated on 12 character strengths by three different sources: themselves, peer cadets and supervisors. Evaluations from the different sources were compared, and consistency across sources for each of the 12 character strengths, were examined.

Conclusion:
7 of 12 character strengths (leadership, persistence, citizenship, social intelligence, love of learning, perspective, and self-regulation) showed significant and positive correlations between two or three of the evaluation sources. Peers and supervisors were more consistent in their evaluations of the cadets compared to peers/self-evaluation and supervisor/self-evaluation.