Development and validation of the Sweet Army Culture Scale (SACS)

Military children are often unspoken or underrepresented casualties of modern day wars. The purpose of this study was to develop a method of empirically measuring civilian mental health professionals' perceived knowledge of the culture of the United States Army. The rational-empirical approach was used during instrument development. The study was divided into three phases: item generation, Army expert panel review, and a pilot study with mental health professionals. Ten experts provided quantitative and qualitative data to inform scale item revisions prior to the pilot study. A revised version of the scale was administered to 97 professionals. Three separate versions of the scale were tested throughout the course of the study.;Principal component analysis with varimax rotation extracted three factors (Army Knowledge, Army Family Processes, and Adaptability of Army Families) explaining 70.96% of the total scale variance. The Cronbach's alpha was 0.98 and the factor loadings ranged from .42 to .84. These findings show the presence of a strong factor structure. Face and content validity was established via the expert panel. The final result was a 30-item, self-report scale that measures the perceived knowledge of Army culture of mental health professionals in a variety of settings. The SACS-Charlie version reflects an initial attempt to measure the most potent knowledge that mental health professionals need to know in order to provide effective and appropriate services for Army children and families. Subsequent studies can further address this goal.