A Mixed Methods Examination of Social Support in Military Spouses: Implications for Intervention

Background: A decade of war in Iraq and Afghanistan has taken a toll on US military service members and their families (IOM, 2013).  Although negative effects of deployment related stressors on military spouses and other family members are well documented (e.g., Barker & Berry, 2009; Renshaw, Rodrigues & Jones, 2008), research has only recently shifted its focus to resilience-enhancing factors that may protect against the deleterious effects of stress.  Social support, broadly defined as “support accessible to an individual through social ties to other individuals, groups, and the larger community” (Lin, Simeone, Ensel, & Kuo, 1979)(p.108), is a widely studied concept generally regarded as helpful during times of stress.  Although social support has been shown to mitigate deployment related stress on family well-being by reducing stress experienced by the Active Duty spouse during both deployment and reintegration (e.g., Lester et al., 2014), little is known about social support needs in National Guard/Reserve (NG/R) spouses or the relationships among social support, mental health and resilience in this population.  The objectives of this mixed methods research are to 1) characterize the need for social supports during deployment and the types of social supports that are available to them during multiple phases of deployment and 2) elucidate temporal and directional relationships between social support, mental health, and resilience during the first year of reintegration. 

Methods: Data is drawn from a larger intervention development study.  In-depth qualitative interviews were conducted with 30 OEF/OIF female NG/R spouses who have a child under the age of five during the needs assessment phase of the larger study.   All interviews were audiorecorded and transcribed verbatim.  Data were analyzed using the six phases of thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006) using theoretically driven conceptualizations of social support as sensitizing concepts in Atlas.ti.  As part of a larger clinical trial, self-report measures of social support, utilization, mental health symptoms, and resilience were collected at three timepoints from N=103 spouses during the first year of reintegration. An autoregressive cross-lagged (ARCL) panel model approach (Curran, 2000) using MPlus 6.1will be used to examine temporal and directional relationships among social support, mental health, and resilience while controlling for treatment condition.

Results:  Qualitative analysis revealed salient themes related to accessibility, utility and type of social supports (e.g. formal, informal, military-specific, civilian).  Most participants discussed both formal and informal mechanisms of social support during deployment and reintegration as being highly valuable and directly related to their own mental health and ability to parent their children. Statistically significant relationships between social support, mental health, and resilience during reintegration will also be reported.

Conclusions and Implications:  Community-dwelling NG/R spouses who are parents of very young children experience unique deployment related stressors and rely heavily on informal supports during deployment and reintegration due to geographic dispersal and distance from formal installation-based supports.  Building capacity for greater collaboration between both military and civilian formal and informal supports may enhance military spouse well-being and capacity to parent.  Implications for service delivery and phase-specific preventive intervention will be discussed.