The primary goal of the current study was to re-evaluate, revise, and abbreviate alternate forms of the Situational Assessment of Leadership: Student Assessment (SALSA©) developed by Grant (2009). Archival response sets collected from individuals with extensive experience in leadership who were administered either the full-length SALSA© or Form A or B in previous studies. A total of 80 individual response sets comprised the final sample. Items were categorized by p-value and Subject Matter Expert ratings gathered from the previous study. Items were then selected based on a combination of difficulty and item-total correlation (ITC) values. Selected items were paired based on ITC, and randomly assigned to either Form A or Form B. The newly created forms yielded acceptable alpha coefficients, indicating satisfactory reliability. The coefficient of equivalence between the two forms was high, indicating that the two tests are acceptable alternate forms of the SALSA©.

The Situational Assessment of Leadership: Student Assessment (SALSA©) was developed in the spring of 2009 to be used as a measure of student leadership. Study 1 assessed alternate forms reliability of the SALSA using scores from 178 students. The overall scores on SALSA Form A and SALSA Form B showed a significant correlation (rAB = .906, p < .01). Dimension scores on the two forms ranged from rAB = .475 to rAB = .804. Study 2 evaluated the convergent validity between the SALSA and the Western Kentucky University Center for Leadership Excellence assessment center. SALSA scores as well as assessment scores from 53 students were analyzed. The overall scores on the SALSA and CLE assessment center had a significant yet moderate correlation (r = .513). Dimension correlations were significant but low, ranging from r = .310 to r = .392. The strong correlations in Study 1 indicate the two forms of the SALSA may be used as alternate measures such as in a pre and post-test of leadership. The convergent validities in Study 2 demonstrate that both the SALSA and assessment center may be used to assess leadership. However, the low convergent validities across dimensions indicate overall scores likely should be used rather than dimension scores.

This thesis presents a framework capable of integrating hard (physics-based) and soft (people-generated) data for the purpose of achieving increased situational assessment (SA) and effective course of action (CoA) generation upon risk identification. The proposed methodology is realized through the extension of an existing Risk Management Framework (RMF). In this work, the RMF’s SA capabilities are augmented via the injection of soft data features into its risk modeling; the performance of these capabilities is evaluated via a newly-proposed risk-centric information fusion effectiveness metric. The framework’s CoA generation capabilities are also extended through the inclusion of people-generated data, capturing important subject matter expertise and providing mission-specific requirements. Furthermore, this work introduces a variety of CoA-related performance measures, used to assess the fitness of each individual potential CoA, as well as to quantify the overall chance of mission success improvement brought about by the inclusion of soft data. This conceptualization is validated via experimental analysis performed on a combination of real- world and synthetically-generated maritime scenarios. It is envisioned that the capabilities put forth herein will take part in a greater system, capable of ingesting and seamlessly integrating vast amounts of heterogeneous data, with the intent of providing accurate and timely situational updates, as well as assisting in operational decision making.