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Dissertation
Diversity Training
University of West Florida Libraries
Doctor of Education (EDD), University of West Florida
2011
Abstract
As American society has become more diverse, the U's. military has changed with respect to race, gender, ethnicity, and religious affiliation. As a result, managing diversity in the military services has become increasingly important because military leaders must attain specific outcomes, such as mission success and organizational survival, during times of budget constraints, having to do more with less and competing for talented personnel. The Defense Equal Opportunity Management Institute (DEOMI) training program was developed to educate service members on diversity issues with a goal of increasing their understanding about workforce diversity, changing their attitudes toward diversity, and ultimately improving combat readiness in the military services. The purpose of this research was to determine if the DEOMI Equal Opportunity Advisor (EOA) blended training intervention could significantly influence the EOA's knowledge, feelings, and understanding of workforce diversity. A secondary purpose of this study was to investigate learner performance as a possible predictor of the learner's emotional intelligence skills. Therefore, emotional intelligence is used as the theoretical framework to examine EOA trainees' feelings and understanding of workforce diversity. This study was quasi-experimental, using a two-phased sequential explanatory mixed-methods design with both quantitative and qualitative data collection procedures. Descriptive statistics, paired-samples t test, and simple regression analysis were used to analyze the quantitative data. The qualitative phase consisted of one-on-one interviews of purposely selected learners and was designed to consider the findings from the quantitative results to determine areas of concern that needed further explanation and expansion. Data revealed significant improvements in learner skills in the sub-categories of stereotypes, information, awareness, respect, and self-awareness. For the sub-categories of empathy, receptiveness, and interpersonal skills, data yielded no significant statistical results; however, there were improvements noted based on effect size calculations for receptiveness and interpersonal skills. Further, during analysis of EOA trainees' test scores from the Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) courses, the researcher found that test scores do not predict emotional intelligence skills. Although the data in this study did not meet all statistical criteria, significant improvements were made and the data provides insightful information on the effectiveness of the revised EOA curriculum.
Details
- Title
- Diversity Training
- Resource Type
- Dissertation
- Publisher
- University of West Florida Libraries
- Format
- pdf
- Number of pages
- 191
- Copyright
- © 2011 Robin Ragsdale Moore
- Identifiers
- 99380090832606600
- Academic Unit
- School of Education
- Language
- English
- Awarding Institution
- University of West Florida; Doctor of Education (EDD)
- Theses and Dissertations
- Doctor of Education (EDD), University of West Florida