Personality and performance in military working dogs: Reliability and predictive validity of behavioral tests

Quantification and description of individual differences in behavior, or personality differences, is now well-established in the working dog literature. What is less well-known is the predictive relationship between particular dog behavioral traits (if any) and important working outcomes. Here we ev...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Applied animal behaviour science 2010-10, Vol.127 (1), p.51-65
Main Authors: Sinn, David L., Gosling, Samuel D., Hilliard, Stewart
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Behavioral instrument
Data processing
Military dog
Personality
Predictive validity
Reliability
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Summary:Quantification and description of individual differences in behavior, or personality differences, is now well-established in the working dog literature. What is less well-known is the predictive relationship between particular dog behavioral traits (if any) and important working outcomes. Here we evaluate the validity of a dog behavioral test instrument given to military working dogs (MWDs) from the 341st Training Squadron, USA Department of Defense (DoD); the test instrument has been used historically to select dogs to be trained for deployment. A 15-item instrument was applied on three separate occasions prior to training in patrol and detection tasks, after which dogs were given patrol-only, detection-only, or dual-certification status. On average, inter-rater reliability for all 15 items was high (mean = 0.77), but within this overall pattern, some behavioral items showed lower inter-rater reliability at some time points (0.50) across shorter test intervals, but decreased with increasing test interval (
ISSN:0168-1591
1872-9045
DOI:10.1016/j.applanim.2010.08.007