Previous studies show that body composition is related to injury risk and physical performance in soldiers. Thus, valid methods for measuring body composition in military personnel are needed. The frequently used body mass index method is not a valid measure of body composition in soldiers, but reliability and validity of alternative field methods are less investigated in military personnel. Thus, we carried out test and retest of skinfold (SKF), single frequency bioelectrical impedance analysis (SF-BIA), and multifrequency bioelectrical impedance analysis measurements in 65 male and female soldiers. Several validated equations were used to predict percent body fat from these methods. Dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry was also measured, and acted as the criterion method. Results showed that SF-BIA was the most reliable method in both genders. In women, SF-BIA was also the most valid method, whereas SKF or a combination of SKF and SF-BIA produced the highest validity in men. Reliability and validity varied substantially among the equations examined. The best methods and equations produced test-retest 95% limits of agreement below ±1% points, whereas the corresponding validity figures were ±3.5% points. Each investigator and practitioner must consider whether such measurement errors are acceptable for its specific use.

Background and Aim: The Suicide Cognitions Scale (SCS) was developed to assess a broad range of suicide-related cognitions. Research to date supports the scale's factor structure, internal consistency, and construct validity. The present study tested the scale's prospective validity for suicide attempts among 97 military personnel presenting to an emergency department or psychiatric outpatient clinic for an unscheduled walk-in evaluation. Method: Cox regression and receiver operator characteristic analyses were conducted to test the prospective validity of the SCS. Results: Results supported the prospective validity of the SCS (area under the curve [AUC] = 0.69) and indicate the scale's performance is comparable to an empirically supported measure of suicide ideation (AUC = 0.75). The SCS performance was not reduced by removing items containing the word suicide. Limitations: Homogeneous sample comprised of US soldiers, predominantly male, with recent suicidal ideation. Conclusion: Results support the SCS as an indicator of subsequent risk for suicidal behavior when used in acute care settings, and suggest the scale's performance is similar to more traditional suicide risk screening methods that depend on honest self-disclosure of suicidal thoughts.

Representations of war recur throughout art, whether celebrating the glories and heroism of conflict, or depicting its horrors and follies. This paper uses qualitative audience research to examine soldiers' own responses to the representation of soldiers in choreographer Rosie Kay's dance performance 5 Soldiers: The Body is the Frontline. This article explores how for military audiences the satisfaction of an internalized sense of authenticity allowed them to accept the performance as a legitimate representation; at the same time the presentation of war in a choreographic language meant that the performance was also abstracted, with theatrical and stylized elements that were far from authentic as a documentary. This paper proposes that it was the combination of authenticity with theatricality that generated empathetic investment and made 5 Soldiers an articulate witness to the military experience.

Over that last several decades the ethics of war has grown into a major subfield in philosophy at the same time as large literatures have developed on the relation between gender and war as well as feminist approaches to the ethics of war. This article aims to contribute to these literatures and to bring them into closer contact. It argues that canonical just war theorists such as Grotius, Pufendorf, Vattel, and Walzer rely on appeals to masculinity to help ground the obligations of soldiers to participate in war upon command. This appeal helps them overcome their otherwise weak arguments for the political subordination of soldiers, or what I call the Internal Problem of the soldier. It also helps explain a problem that has vexed contemporary ethics of war scholars, namely, the supposed equal right to kill combatants in war, or what I call the External Problem of the soldier. If this is true, then just war theorists should be much more concerned with the gender and war literature and find common ground with feminists who have treated the problem of the political standing of soldiers as a philosophical priority.

This article analyses the politics of “ground truth,” a premise central to the contemporary military dissent movement in the United States. Ground truth refers to the “truths” about war that soldiers who have experienced its realities can bring to bear on prevailing war narratives in order to disrupt them. The article identifies how the authority of ground truth is bound with accounts of gender and sexuality through which particular understandings of war (principally war as combat and violence) are reproduced. Examination of two prominent dissenting subject positions within the movement, the “(anti)war hero” and the “peace mom,” suggests that authority to oppose war is organized around the hegemonic military masculine figure of the warrior hero. Potentially more unruly war experiences, such as those of non-combat military personnel, remain obscured. I explore what perspectives and understandings of war might be revealed if we consider non-combat personnel as actively engaged in, and experiencing, war and discuss implications for dissent. The article therefore addresses how gendered power structures the ways in which war is known, understood, and also opposed through authenticity-based authority claims.

Methodological rigor in constructivist inquiry is established through an assessment of trustworthiness and authenticity. Trustworthiness parallels the positivistic concepts of internal and external validity, focusing on an assessment of the inquiry process. Authenticity, however, is unique to constructivist inquiry and has no parallel in the positivistic paradigm. Authenticity involves an assessment of the meaningfulness and usefulness of interactive inquiry processes and social change that results from these processes. However, the techniques for ascertaining authenticity are in the early stages of development. Therefore, the purpose of this article is to describe a process for assessing authenticity in a constructivist inquiry. A brief overview of constructivist inquiries are described in relation to a set of techniques designed specifically to assess five dimensions of authenticity. Implications for constructivist researchers and social work research are presented.

Soldiers in the military are exposed to numerous stressors, including some that are of an extreme nature. The main objective of this military psychology research study was to evaluate soldiers' occupational stress. Even though several tools have been developed to measure stress in this population, to date, none have focused on occupational stress. Hence, we developed the Military Occupational Stress Response Scale (MOSRS) to provide a tool to objectively measure soldiers' occupational stress responses. An initial pool of 27 items was assembled from the literature, existing instruments, and interviews with soldiers. Of those 27, 17 were included in the MOSRS. The scale was subsequently completed by soldiers from one military region, and exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis were conducted using Mplus8.3 and IBM SPSS 28.0 software, respectively. A total of 847 officers and soldiers were selected for scale testing, and 670 subjects were retained after data cleaning and screening according to the set criteria. After performing the Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO) and Bartlett's test, principal components analysis (PCA) was appropriate. The PCA yielded a three-factor model (physiological, psychological, and behavioral responses) with the items and factors strongly correlated. The confirmatory factor analysis revealed loads ranging from between 0.499 and 0.878 for each item. The Cronbach's α coefficient of the MOSRS was between 0.710 and 0.900, and the Omega reliability was between 0.714 and 0.898, which were all higher than the critical standard value of 0.7, indicating that the scale has good reliability. Analysis of the discrimination validity of each dimension revealed that the scale has good discrimination validity. The MOSRS demonstrated sound psychometric characteristics with acceptable reliability and validity, suggesting that it could be used to assess occupational stress in military personnel.

ABSTRACT As part of a societal preoccupation with subjectivity and emotions, a discussion of authenticity has started to emerge in the professional practice of journalism. This is similar yet different to the more traditional notion of credibility: while credibility has connotations of truth-telling and unbiased reporting, authenticity points to other features, such as genuineness, intimacy, and, notoriously, trust, derived from what is regarded as an honest self. This article discusses the shift from a theoretical perspective and through an analysis of newspaper pieces written around the Irish Abortion Referendum of 2018. While some of these stories could be uncritically framed in the tradition of the so-called “personal essay” that is associated with “click-bait” journalism and cheap content, the article proposes that they present personal stories as a form of “witnessing” (Peters 2001) and “bearing witness” (Tait 2011), both of the journalists and writers’ own experiences and the experiences of others. The reflective tone becomes a dialogical form of correspondence between the author and the reader, where authenticity is derived in the relationship between the writer, the text, and the audience.

This study aims to investigate the implementation of the English achievement test for the twelfth-grade students at SMAN 4 Tebo, Jambi in the academic year 2019/2020. This study was a contenr analyis. The objects of this study were English achievement test items. It consisted of 40 multiple-choice questions and 5 essay questions. The data collection method was a document analysis checklist. In this study, the researcher analyzed the data from English achievement test for validity aspects such as content validity and construct validity, the degree of reliability, and the implementation of language authenticity criteria. The findings of this study revealed that; (1) the content validity shows 76% valid, and the construct validity shows 60% valid; (2) the reliability shows coefficient 0.281 for multiple-choice items and 0,554 for essay items, and it is reliable; (3) the results of analyzing the authenticity shows that the listening items, reading test and essay writing are authentic. However, each part has some weaknesses. Especially in the reading test, most of the passages use in reading tests failed to represent the world context even though the topics of the passages are rational and based on the real context. Nevertheless, the English teacher who constructed the English achievement test did not mention the sources from which the passages were taken. Next, the samples of the format letter, announcement, and pamphlet look unnatural view from the format and design. Moreover, the English Achievement Test for twelfth-grade students of SMAN 4 Tebo, Jambi has fulfilled the characteristics of validity, reliability, and authenticity as a good test or standardized test.

The objective of this study was to examine the content validity of commonly used muscle performance tests in military personnel and to investigate the reliability of a proposed test battery. For the content validity investigation, thirty selected tests were those described in the literature and/or commonly used in the Nordic and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) countries. Nine selected experts rated, on a four-point Likert scale, the relevance of these tests in relation to five different work tasks: lifting, carrying equipment on the body or in the hands, climbing, and digging. Thereafter, a content validity index (CVI) was calculated for each work task. The result showed excellent CVI (≥0.78) for sixteen tests, which comprised of one or more of the military work tasks. Three of the tests; the functional lower-limb loading test (the Ranger test), dead-lift with kettlebells, and back extension, showed excellent content validity for four of the work tasks. For the development of a new muscle strength/endurance test battery, these three tests were further supplemented with two other tests, namely, the chins and side-bridge test. The inter-rater reliability was high (intraclass correlation coefficient, ICC2,1 0.99) for all five tests. The intra-rater reliability was good to high (ICC3,1 0.82–0.96) with an acceptable standard error of mean (SEM), except for the side-bridge test (SEM%>15). Thus, the final suggested test battery for a valid and reliable evaluation of soldiers’ muscle performance comprised the following four tests; the Ranger test, dead-lift with kettlebells, chins, and back extension test. The criterion-related validity of the test battery should be further evaluated for soldiers exposed to varying physical workload.