The ‘Shrinking’ Defense Industrial Base
with DoD?” if enough information was available for interpretation. The revised categorization for the initial “Other” results caused the number of those responses to drop from 24% (162 responses) to 10% (71 responses) of the sample. Creating Additional Categories The authors conducted a second round of coding to create additional categories not originally contained in the survey instrument. These categories reflected themes that arose in text responses, often corroborated by respondents’ Final Comments. For instance, because a few respondents ( n = 11) indicated issues with SAM.gov, not DoD specifically, the authors created a new code to categorize these responses. This second round of coding resulted in four new categories for the question of why contractors left the DIB and further reduced the overall number of “Other” responses from 10% (71 responses) to 5% (34 responses) of the overall sample. The four new categories follow: 1. The entity is still bidding for work but has identified an issue working with DoD. 2. The entity "lost" a certain contractor status and the work with it. 3. The entity has exited due to SAM.gov issues. 4. The entity has exited due to General Services Administration issues. Contractor Profiles The authors relied on contract-level data from USASpending.gov to create contractor profiles for the entire DIB population (131,651 contractors). Since most contractors had multiple contract actions over time, the authors used only the contract action with the most recent action date. In those cases where a contractor had multiple contract actions with the same action date, one was randomly selected based upon a unique row identifier. The result was a single row of contract action data for each contractor, representing their profile, that allowed the authors to conduct nonresponse bias testing (available from corresponding author by request) and to analyze additional demographic characteristics beyond the survey responses.
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Defense ARJ, Summer 2025, Vol. 32 No. 2: 194—223
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