Military Family Coping Project - Phase 2

The Military Family Coping Project has been designed to examine the stress and adjustment issues surrounding deployments for Soldiers, Spouses and Parents of Soldiers. This project has the luxury of seeing soldiers in the context of their nuclear families. Both military personnel and families are impacted by deployments, yet little is known about the nature of family stress in relationship to that of the soldier. This project has been designed to fill this gap. In this study we are seeking 500 soldiers, 175 spouses and 175 parents of soldiers to fill out a survey style instrument that address such topics as prior stress to entering the military, family relationships, Previous combat stress exposure, mental health issues such as personality type, alcohol and tobacco use, coping and social support/resilience, and quality of life indicators. With the end of the War in Iraq and the cut backs in deployments we have obtained 31.6% of our soldier sample, 5% of spouses and 7% of parents of soldiers. We have learned a great deal this past year as to how to recruit family members. By the end of October we will be approaching a large group of soldiers about to deploy from Ft. Hood. In preparation for this we are involving Family Support Groups that correspond to this larger Soldier group in an effort to energize family members about the project and thus increase our sample. It is our belief that we will have obtained our sample and be able to move on to data analysis in the next few months.