The purpose of this executive note is to assist policy offices, stakeholders, and other interested parties
in understanding when it is appropriate to compare the results from DoD surveys conducted by the
Office of People Analytics (OPA) to other surveys, including the caveats to note when doing so.
While it is tempting to compare results from surveys conducted by OPA to the results of other surveys
when the topics are similar, such comparisons should only be made after considering the following
questions:
- Is the population of interest comparable?
- Are the sampling strategies the same?
- Were the data weighted to represent the population of interest?
- Were the data collected across a similar time period/time frame?
- Were the same procedures used to collect the data?
- Were the concepts defined and measured in the same way?