Airmen and their families live under many stresses—frequent moves, deployments, reintegration following deployments—and rely on the Air Force for resources to help safeguard the health and well-being of themselves and their families. Many of these resources are utilized at the base level. That is, each Air Force base (AFB) has a set of offices, programs, and individuals whose responsibilities include providing information, education, health care, recreational programs and facilities, and other programs and services to enhance the quality of life (QOL) and organizational commitment of Airmen and their families. But Airmen and their families may also rely on...

This chapter describes the data and methods used in this study. It first describes how we selected Air Force installations included in the analysis and defined base areas. The chapter also details the data and methods used to create the RAND BASE-I. Finally, the chapter provides a brief description of the survey data used for the analyses described in the subsequent two chapters about the association between RAND BASE-I scores and Airman outcomes. Because this chapter focuses on data sources and methods, readers interested in skipping to the study results may wish to skip to Chapter Three.

We limited the...

The first step in our analysis plan was to compute a social indicators RAND BASE-I score for each of the 66 AFBs included in the study. Recall that RAND BASE-I scores arerelative, not absolute. That is, we are always comparing one base area with another, typically whichever neighborhood performs the highest (or lowest) on a specific indicator. We must also emphasize that we calculated a ranking of social and economic indicators for the military and nonmilitary populations living in these base areas, which includes both the base and the surrounding area. Thus, this index reports characteristics for regions and...

This chapter presents the results from a multilevel analysis of the 2011 Community Assessment Survey. The modeling technique allows us to assess the association between the RAND BASE-I and its constituent domains and Airman outcomes at the individual level while controlling for the fact that those Airmen are “nested” within specific bases.²⁴ We start by describing the sample, then describe the outcomes we considered in the analysis, and finally present a summary of the results of the multilevel modeling on whether any associations with the RAND BASE-I were found. We report only those associations that were statistically significant in the...

This chapter presents the results from a multilevel analysis of data from the 2010 Caring for People Survey. Separate models were run for active-duty and reserve Airmen. As with Chapter Four, we start by describing the sample, and then we describe outcomes regarding base programs and services, satisfaction with aspects of an Airman’s neighborhood and military life in general, and service commitment. Along with those outcomes, we report the results of the multilevel analyses exploring whether these outcomes are associated with the RAND BASE-I.

This section describes the respondents included in our analyses according to base of assignment, residence relative...

The goal of this study was to provide the Air force with additional data with which it could more effectively and efficiently distribute resources at the base level and target its programming to ensure that those with the greater need have the appropriate type of Air Force resources available to them. To do this, we first developed the RAND BASE-I using social and economic indicators from census data. The results of this analysis showed that there is a great deal of variation in the quality and characteristics of the areas around Air Force installations where Airmen and their families live....