Abstract

Although the United States military has traditionally placed great emphasis upon the integrity and honesty of its members, there has been little research done to assess the effectiveness of its formal military ethics instruction. The purpose for conducting the study was to assess the effects of the military ethics instruction provided by the Reserve Officers Training Corps upon its students' perceptions of honesty. ;The data for the study were derived from a survey of freshman and senior AFROTC students at eight selected universities. The data analysis indicated that respondents held overall positive perceptions of honesty as a personal and professional value. The respondents expressed an overall negative perception on one survey item which dealt with an absolute value statement about honesty. This finding was validated by the neutral perception that the respondents indicated toward ethical relativism in response to another survey item. ;There were no statistically significant differences in the total Likert-type item mean scores. The means of the five item categories also indicated no significant differences in the perceptions of freshman and senior respondents. These results did not validate the effectiveness of the AFROTC military ethics curriculum in changing the perceptions of AFROTC students toward the value of honesty, but did indicate that the ethical perceptions of the senior students had possibly been reinforced through their exposure to the AFROTC military ethics curriculum. The results also indicated that the senior respondents may have developed a perception that the military careers upon which they were about to embark required a higher ethical standard than that of their civilian counterparts. ;The influence that had made the strongest impact on the ethics and values of the majority of the respondents was perceived to be the family, with religion as the next most common influence selected. Formal education and AFROTC were both selected by less than 10% of the respondents. The results of the study indicated that the influence of AFROTC instruction in relation to other factors in the students' lives was limited