Initial Validation of the U.S. Army Global Assessment Tool

The U.S. Army developed the Global Assessment Tool (GAT) to monitor psychosocial fitness and well-being among soldiers and provide a means to objectively gauge the success of newly implemented resilience training programs. Despite its widespread use (taken over 5.2 million times) and stated utility for program evaluation, there is relatively little published evidence regarding the GAT’s reliability and validity. We used exploratory structural equation modeling (ESEM) with 4 random samples of soldiers (n = 10,000 each) to examine the factorial validity and reliability of the GAT. An 11-factor solution (Self-Management, Positive Affect, Meaning, Work Engagement, Organizational Trust, Loneliness, Negative Cognitions, Hostility, Negative Emotions, Depressive Symptoms, and Emotion-Focused Coping), with 4 additional factors assessing character strengths (Intellect, Warmth, Civic Strengths, and Temperance), fit well and replicated in a second random sample. A higher order, 2-factor model using composites scores ...