Enlistment of conscripts in Sweden takes place at the age of 18 and is compulsory for men. A few women, who can apply voluntarily, are enlisted each year. This paper reports a predictive validity study where performance results from completed basic military training were used as criteria.

The main parts of the enlistment procedure are an intelligence test, an interview by a psychologist, and physical and medical examination. The intelligence test is computerized, and contains 10 tests of verbal, spatial, and problem solving ability. The test results are evaluated in terms of three latent variables: General ability, Verbal ability (Gc) and Spatial ability (Gv). The two latter factors are residuals to the first (Mårdberg and Carlstedt, 1998). The variables of physical capacity are muscle strength, physical fitness, eyesight, and hearing. The medical examination results in a health classification, used primarily as a basis for the decision whether the conscript should do military service or not. The psychologist’s interview yields an assessment of Psychological functioning ability of every conscript. Those who have reached the level of at least five on the stanine scale of General intelligence are also rated concerning Leadership ability.

The enlistment procedure aims at the classification of conscripts to all the different positions of the armed forces. At enlistment however, as much as 35% of the population are screened out. The psychologist’s assessment as well as that of the medical doctor might result in an exemption from any kind of military service (this goes for about 1%). The other 34% are going to the training reserve and will be trained only if needed for military preparedness reasons. Thus, only about 65% of those coming to enlistment are selected for compulsory military service.

The first selection and its impact on the distributions of a few of the predictor variables are presented for another sample, enlisted in autumn 1997. The figures are fairly stable over years.

Table 1. Proportion (%) of individuals per predictor variable level, exempted or placed in the training reserve. Numbers from enlistment in autumn 1997. n» 21 800.

The variables most restricted in range after the first selection step are Psychological functioning (PF), Leadership ability (LA) and General ability (G).

The next step is the classification of individuals to different levels of duty. About 8% will become non-commissioned officers and be trained for 12-15 months to be in charge of units of platoon or company size (30 - 120 soldiers). Around 15 % will be trained for 10 months to become section leaders, in charge of 8 -10 soldiers. All these three categories are in the following analyses grouped under the NCO label. The rest are placed as privates in different duties with different demands on psychological and physical capacities. Privates have different training duration (8 - 10 months). They are assigned to different branches of the armed forces, and their training is planned to start one or two years after the enlistment.

The validation sample contained 15.200 men (the few women were excluded) who had completed their military training in 1997 or earlier (29% had completed 1996). The available criteria were their military marks and what kind of duty the marks referred to (according to level and service). Two of the marks used for the validation purpose were Overall competence and Job knowledge. These marks certainly have shortcomings in reliability. They are assessed by many different instructors who work in many different environments, certainly having varying opinions of what is good performance. However, the validity of the criterion lies in the fact that it is used for decisions whether an individual after training will get a placement in the defense organization or not.

Every mark is set referring to a special duty in a special service. One way to handle this heterogeneity would be to separate the individuals from one duty of one company at a time to study the correlation between predictors and criteria. This would, however, result in too small groups for the statistical analyses. A more rough way of categorization was used here for criterion grouping: two levels of duty (NCO level and privates level) times three kinds of military service [Assisting combat (anti-aircraft and artillery), Combat (infantry, cavalry, and armor), and Support (communication, logistics, and engineer troops)].

One category that we had no knowledge about were those who had left their training in advance for psychological or medical reasons. This also applies for those who had been allowed to postpone their training for the reason that the training period would interfere too much with their university studies.

A description of the enlistment variables and the criterion variables for the two levels and the three kinds of services is displayed in Table 2.

Table 2. Means and standard deviations of enlistment variables and criterion variables.

The outcome of the classification is displayed in the tab