Positive and Negative Effects of the Military on Family Structure
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How Military Families Reply Before, During and After Deployment
Findings from the RAND Deployment Life Study
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Photograph by Justin Connaher/U.South. Air Forcefulness
What happens to armed services families when a service member is deployed?
In study afterward study, deployment has been associated with poorer mental health in military families, behavioral problems in children, a college risk of divorce, and college rates of suicide. Not surprisingly, service members and spouses regularly name deployments every bit the most stressful aspect of military life.
The Deployment Life Study (DLS) — a first-of-its-kind longitudinal study — was designed to assess the bear upon of deployment on military families and to help the Section of Defence force, policymakers, and service providers amend prepare these families for a deployment. The DLS surveyed more than than 2,700 married military families from all branches (i.e., Ground forces, Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps) and components (agile, reserve, and Guard) of the military. Up to 3 family unit members — the service member, the spouse, and a kid age eleven–eighteen (if available) — were surveyed every 4 months for three years. While deployment policies regarding length of each deployment vary across services, our study allowed u.s. to define a study deployment for each family individually and monitor them beyond their own deployment-related experience.
The DLS evaluated key outcomes, including the quality of marital and parental relationships; psychological, behavioral, and physical wellness of family unit members; kid well-being; and war machine integration (or attitudes toward armed services service). Conducted from 2011 to 2015, the DLS allowed researchers to examine family operation and individual well-being earlier, during, and later on deployment. The analysis was designed to respond three questions, and our findings are detailed below.
1. What happens to military families over the course of a deployment cycle?
The most common theme was that armed services families are resilient. Despite the challenges they experienced before and during a service fellow member'due south deployment, family relationships and other outcomes mostly returned to previous levels in one case the service member came abode.
Family relationships and other outcomes generally returned to previous levels once the service fellow member came habitation.
During deployment, outcomes changed — some for the better (physical and psychological aggression betwixt partners declined, service members reported a meliorate family environment, college parenting satisfaction, and less binge drinking) and some for the worse (increased depressive symptoms among service members and spouses, increased posttraumatic stress disorder and anxiety symptoms amongst spouses, elevated psychological symptoms in children). In some cases, service members and spouses had opposite reactions to deployment. For instance, while service members every bit a group rated their experiences as a parent college during deployment, spouses reported less satisfaction with being a parent during the same time menstruation.
When service members returned home, well-nigh of these changes reversed: By the end of the reintegration phase, family relationships and well-existence had generally returned to pre-deployment levels. An exception was observed among teen participants, who reported significantly lower-quality relationships with the deployed parent when the parent came home.
two. How do postal service-deployment outcomes differ betwixt families that did and did not experience deployment?
Not all service members in the written report actually deployed. By comparing the outcomes of families that experienced deployment to those of well-matched families that did non, the analyses attempted to identify the causal upshot of deployment on family well-being. The results of these analyses were striking and unambiguous: Across a wide range of variables, there was niggling departure between the two groups by the terminate of the study.
The analyses establish that grooming for deployment and communication during deployment were critical factors.
The exceptions were teens and children. In families that experienced a deployment, spouses reported more than child difficulties (specifically, emotional carry and peer problems) at the end of the study than their peers whose spouses did not deploy. Interestingly, this concern applied only to children younger than 11, not to teenagers. Neither teens' parents nor the youths themselves reported behavioral difficulties. Simply teens did study worse family unit cohesion and lower relationship quality with the non-deployed parent than did their peers in non-deployed families.
3. How well practise characteristics of families and the deployment explain which families are doing better or worse when the service member returns?
The analyses found that grooming and advice were critical factors. For example, the more than service members and spouses reported preparing for deployment (developing an emergency fiscal program or buying life insurance), the higher their parenting satisfaction after deployment. The more frequently that spouses reported communicating with their partners during deployment, and the more satisfied spouses were with the amount of advice, the higher their marital satisfaction when the service member returned.
Beyond a broad range of variables, there was little difference between families that experienced deployment and those that didn't past the end of the study.
In improver, couples who left the armed services after deployment (and during the three years they were in the DLS) reported lower marital satisfaction and increased psychological symptoms by the terminate of the report. At that place was no way to decide whether these activities straight affect family unit functioning or whether more than or less resilient families only appoint in different behaviors around deployments. These associations emerged fifty-fifty after decision-making for family unit characteristics at the fourth dimension of study enrollment, consistent with the view that the behaviors themselves influence family well-beingness.
The study's findings also suggested that service members' exposure to traumatic events during deployment, rather than separation from family unit itself, brought about any negative effects associated with being deployed. Nevertheless, the relationship between traumatic experiences and post-deployment outcomes was circuitous.
The DLS assessed the effects of physical trauma (such as being injured), combat trauma (exchanging fire with the enemy), and psychological trauma (witnessing trauma or vicarious exposure to trauma) during deployment on military family unit outcomes after deployment. All three predicted greater symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder and low, lower satisfaction with the war machine, and weaker intentions to remain in the service post-deployment. Other outcomes differed based on the blazon of trauma. For example, service members' exposure to physical and psychological trauma predicted higher levels of psychological and physical aggression mail service-deployment, co-ordinate to spouses; however, gainsay trauma predicted lower levels of psychological aggression among both service members and spouses post-deployment. For teens, a parent'south experiencing combat trauma was related to poorer functioning and worse relationships with parents, but a service member'south experiencing psychological trauma (in the absence of injury or combat trauma) was related to better teen functioning and relationships with parents.
Implications for Improving the Well-being of Armed services Families
The current findings led RAND researchers to make a number of recommendations for improving the well-beingness of military families.
- Programs, services, and policies should target families that experience deployment trauma, particularly when the service member returns. Given that service members' exposure to trauma appears to have multiple negative consequences when they come home, these families could be targeted for post-deployment support. Programs that target families based on documented experiences, rather than cocky-reported symptoms, might help mitigate bug before they tin can bear upon multiple family members.
- Addressing issues around the fourth dimension of separation may exist of import for avoiding the longer-term impairments acquired by these bug, such as increased morbidity, homelessness, unemployment, and substance use amid veterans. The results indicate that service members who take separated from service mail service-deployment have significantly elevated psychological symptoms. Regardless of whether psychological problems predate separation or non, the separation period appears to be a high-take a chance time for individuals who leave the military machine.
- Programs that permit and encourage communication both between and inside military machine families during a deployment may promote their well-being. When spouses were satisfied with the quantity of advice during deployment, family relationships were amend when the service member returned. Maintaining open up lines of communication betwixt family unit members during the separation may ease the process of reintegration once the service fellow member returns.
- Back up to better relationships amid service members, spouses, and their teen children during the mail-deployment period may improve family functioning. Given the effects of deployment on teens' relationships with both parents, information technology may be more than constructive to pursue programs that focus on preventing declines in relationship quality and family cohesion after the service fellow member returns as ways of promoting family well-being rather than relying on programs that wait for families to seek help in one case relationships degrade.
The DLS provides a robust data set that should enable farther exploration of the problems and challenges that military families confront. For examples, these data can be used to assistance empathize the predictors of separation from the military, farther explore the relationship betwixt advice and deployment related effects, and assess the effect of frequent moves on military family outcomes.
Implications for Future Research on Military Families
The findings also highlight several areas where changes to current enquiry strategies could result in improved data — both in terms of timeliness and quality — for making policy decisions that volition assist war machine families.
- Hereafter enquiry on military families should explore means in which data can be nerveless from multiple family members at the same time. For some outcomes, such as family unit environment and anxiety, service members and spouses reported different outcomes during the same menstruation of the deployment cycle. Collecting data from multiple members of the aforementioned families can capture these differences, and the results can help to tailor support for individual family unit members based on their relationship to the service fellow member (e.g., spouse, child, teen).
- When funding resources become scarce, future research on military families should prioritize longitudinal studies. Compared with retrospective or cross-sectional reports, longitudinal written report designs that follow the same families over time offering the most methodologically robust way to assess the impact of deployment on families.
- Procedures for collecting real-fourth dimension data from military families should exist explored. No unmarried blazon of existent-time data tin can address all the relevant inquiry and policy questions. Some combination of administrative data for service members (such as medical records or personnel data) and ongoing data from a representative console of military family members could prove to exist a very useful, toll-effective solution for informing time-sensitive concerns.
- Develop new theories, measures, and analyses of deployment experiences that can account for the complex human relationship between deployment and post-deployment outcomes. The complex design of our findings deserves farther study. In light of the mixed results for different types of traumatic experiences, new theories, measures, and analyses are needed to better understand which specific deployment experiences have persistent effects on service members and their families, likewise every bit how those furnishings are produced.
Study Limitations
Although extremely valuable because of its analytical rigor and unprecedented telescopic, the DLS does have a few limitations. First, the survey was conducted during a period when operational tempo among U.S. troops was decreasing, combat zones were less volatile, and deployments were less unsafe compared with the years immediately prior. Second, most married service members eligible for the study had previously deployed past the fourth dimension recruitment for DLS began. This ways that families vulnerable to the most negative consequences from deployments may take left the military machine or divorced earlier the study began. The bear on on starting time-time deployers may be very unlike from our findings virtually families with more experience in deployment. Finally, the written report's focus was on families in married households, both with and without children, and so the findings cannot be extended to unmarried-parent household families or single service members.
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