Analysis Of Sociocultural Constructs Applicable To Blue Force Teams: Increasing Fidelity From Pencil And Paper And Video Tests To Virtual Environments

Understanding sociocultural factors and the role they play in a military context is becoming recognized as a shortcoming within both military training and decision-making tools for commanders in the field. We begin by discussing sociocultural theory, its development, and history. Next, we discuss approaches to collecting small-scale friendly force leader and subordinate sociocultural factors. Then, we describe and discuss the utility of Situational Judgment Tests (SJTs) to elicit various sociocultural values in decision-making and how those tests may be translated to more enriched and life-like scenarios in virtual environments. Positive and negative attributes of each approach and viable resources to support their use are discussed