Military Family Coping Project

The Military Family Coping Project is a systematic line of research aimed at empirically informing clinical and programatic interventions to aid the development of family resilience and functional coping related to deployments. This proposal represents Phase II of the program, in which we aim to investigate the interactive influence of risk and resilience factors in predicting functioning of Soldiers, ISOs, and parents during the pre-deployment preparation process. This study is unique in terms of its emphasis on deployment preparation, as well as the inclusion of parents, who are also impacted by deployments and provide a family context in which Soldiers readjust following deployment. It is anticipated that this project will provide valuable insight into familial risk and resilience factors among service members, ISOs, and parents, including an understanding of the exchange of generational coping mechanisms. These data will identify malleable risk factors that will empirically inform the development and improvement of early intervention and treatment programs aimed at promoting health and well-being of service members and their families. Understanding factors that influence the well-being of both service members and their families is important not only to reduce social, physical, health care, and public health costs, but also to improve the longevity of service members being deployed in terms of their ability to re-set for next tasks and missions.