Socioeconomic characteristics of cadets of the Military Academy

The subject of this paper was the research of the socioeconomic characteristics of the Military Academy cadets in an attempt to define them at the individual, family, and regional levels. The aim was to gain insight into the basic socioeconomic characteristics of cadets, their description, and their connection with the broader socioeconomic context. Primary and secondary data were collected. Correlation, factor analysis, and clustering were used in the study. The results show that regional affiliation is a characteristic that can classify respondents into two groups - those who came from developed regions in northern Serbia and the ones coming from the less developed southern regions of the country, that the participation of female members in the cadet population is at the level of developed European countries, that almost 70 percent of cadets come from urban and semi-urban areas, that two-fifths of cadets come from the region of Šumadija and Western Serbia, and that more than half of the cadets have a working-class social background, while slightly more than one-fifth have military background. Almost three-quarters of cadets have a Military grammar school or civilian gymnasium as their secondary education, and the success they have achieved in their education so far can be characterized as very good for more than half of the cadets.