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As the title of this paper suggests, the researchers intend to determine whether military command information newspapers meet the objectives they claim to advocate. The objectives of each of the four services are similar and comply with DoD guidance. Many questions in the readership survey administered by the Tinker AFB Oklahoma City Air Logistics Center public affairs office were designed to test whether the Take Off met military objectives. Since the survey asked many questions on a four or five-point ordinal scale, one could average the scores for those questions to arrive at a possible answer; however, simply calculating the means of scores will not produce significant or useful results for the reader of this project without examining the factors that influence or have an impact on whether military newspapers meet their objectives. Therefore, the research question is the following:

1. Do independent variables, such as age, gender, marital status, rank, how long has one worked on base, amount of education and newspaper use influence whether military newspapers meet the objectives they advocate?

Participants
From a base population of approximately 24,000 people, Tinker AFB Oklahoma City Air Logistics Center public affairs distributed surveys to a sample of 2,400, all of whom are military, civilians, retirees, or family members of people affiliated with Tinker. PA received 254 responses for a response rate of 10.58-percent. The Capstone researchers randomly selected 175 surveys to analyze. Of the 175 people who returned surveys, 13 answered they never read the Take Off, which accounted for 7.4-percent of all respondents. The rest of the sample answered that they at least read the paper occasionally. The survey asked people who responded “never” to skip all questions about the newspaper and proceed to questions about demographics, while the people who replied that they read it at least occasionally were asked to complete the entire questionnaire.
Procedure
Codebook. The researchers developed a codebook on SPSS for the six-page survey developed by the public affairs office at Tinker entitled, Tinker Take Off Readership Survey (see appendix 1). Since some of the questions were multi-part and others asked respondents to mark all that apply. The researchers grouped together items on the survey to form measures.
Operationalization. From the objectives of Air Force newspapers in AFI 35-101, 5.7. Establishing Air Force Newspapers and from items in the survey, the researchers created eight variables to measure. They used the Take Off as a sample to generalize about military newspapers in general.
These variables were the following: the extent to which the base newspaper provided recognition of excellence in performance; information about the base; information about the Air Force; photos and graphic illustrations; mission-essential information to members of the command; information to improve quality of life; information to promote command cohesiveness; and information on personnel-related issues. The researchers grouped the items accordingly, arranging them by identical scales, since survey questions must have identical scales to be grouped together. The Tinker survey incorporated questions with many different types of scales. For example, some questions comprised ordinal data and asked the respondent to select one of five possible answers, while others incorporated ordinal data with one of four possible answers. Still others asked people to choose one of three or even six.

Table 1. Items in Survey Selected to Measure Objectives

The research allowed for two recognition variables because the survey defined recognition in two ways. The first recognition variable in this analysis will measure how readers rate the amount and quality of stories in the Take Off that recognize base people, while the second variable will measure the extent to which people think the paper provides sufficient information on personal recognition and institutional awards. Both support one of the Air Force’s key objectives for the base paper, which is to provide recognition of excellence in performance.