The Department of Defense Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office asked the RAND Corporation to independently assess rates of sexual assault, sexual harassment, and gender discrimination in the military. This volume presents the results of methodological investigations into sources of potential bias in estimates produced from the 2014 RAND Military Workplace Study for active- and reserve-component members in the U.S. military.

The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) aims to estimate the percentage of service members who experienced racial or ethnic harassment or discrimination in the past year. The authors of this report provide information on a survey instrument that RAND Corporation researchers designed to help DoD obtain those estimates. The report describes the instrument-development process, the instrument itself, and recommendations to support its use.

"In early 2014, the Department of Defense Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office asked the RAND National Defense Research Institute to conduct an independent assessment of sexual assault, sexual harassment, and gender discrimination in the military -- an assessment last conducted in 2012 by the department itself with its Workplace and Gender Relations Survey of Active Duty Personnel. This volume documents the methodology used in the resulting RAND Military Workplace Study, which invited close to 560,000 service members to participate in a survey fielded in August and September of 2014. It describes the survey methods, how the new questionnaire was designed, and how sampling, recruitment, and analytic weighting were pursued. It also includes the entire survey instrument."--Website.

Victims of sexual assault and sexual harassment often experience a variety of psychological outcomes and mental health symptoms related to posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, anxiety, substance abuse, suicidal ideation, and self-harm. Sexual trauma also might affect careers. Despite a need to address these harms, some service members have reported that connecting to health care or mental health services following sexual assault or sexual harassment can be difficult-in part because of a lack of leadership support. Given these persistent challenges, the Psychological Health Center of Excellence identified an urgent need to better understand research that is pertinent to sexual assault and sexual harassment during military service so that the U.S. Department of Defense and the military services can improve the health care response for service members. RAND researchers investigated and synthesized relevant research in three topic areas: (1) the effectiveness of psychotherapy treatments designed for adult victims of sexual assault or sexual harassment in military settings; (2) barriers faced by U.S. military members to accessing and remaining in mental health care settings; and (3) associations between sexual assault or sexual harassment and mental health conditions.

This report highlights selected events and the insights of 17 experts interviewed about the significant changes in the provision and delivery of behavioral health care in the U.S. military that took place from 2003-2013.

This report summarizes a review of clinical practices and TRICARE requirements for intensive outpatient programs to treat active-duty members affected by the mental health consequences of sexual harassment and sexual assault while in the military.

The authors examine how the Department of Defense (DoD) COVID-19 vaccination program was implemented, determine how previous DoD vaccination programs influenced those decisions, and identify opportunities to strengthen DoD's vaccination program.

The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) is committed to eliminating harassment and unlawful discrimination within the U.S. armed forces. This includes harassment and discrimination on the basis of race or ethnicity, which persists across the United States, including in the U.S. military. To help military leaders and policymakers better understand the nature of racial/ethnic harassment and discrimination within the armed services, RAND researchers created a survey instrument to assess the prevalence of racial/ethnic harassment and discrimination within DoD. To do so, we (1) reviewed published surveys that assess racial/ethnic harassment, discrimination, microaggressions (i.e., stereotypes about specific races or ethnicities, passive poor treatment by others, and expressions of opinions regarding racism), and related content and (2) consulted with experts in the occurrence and measurement of harassment and discrimination on the basis of race/ethnicity.

This case study describes the decision points and considerations required to produce an unbiased list of priority topics appropriate for evidence synthesis. Standard processes to facilitate research translation are needed to manage the multitude of steps involved in moving research into practice. Evidence synthesis is a key aspect of research translation, because it establishes the effectiveness and translation readiness of a given research topic. Evidence synthesis is resource intensive, and decisions about what evidence to synthesize should be made systematically so that resources are used efficiently. Here, we detail the multistep approach we took to identify research gaps, to assess stakeholder priorities, and to determine the feasibility and need of pursuing an evidence synthesis for each high-priority topic. We identified and reviewed authoritative sources and collated research gaps, translated research gaps into topics that could be readily prioritized, identified stakeholders and developed a prioritization rating system, and determined synthesis needs by establishing how feasible and non-duplicative efforts were to pursue evidence synthesis of the high-priority topics.