Social Support and Coping Self-Efficacy: Differential Effects on Mental Health Among Veterans with and without Arrest Histories

Background and Significance: Mental health and trauma exposure are pressing issues for justice-involved military veterans. In fact, their needs are so complex that targeted interventions for veterans have emerged across the criminal justice system including veterans treatment courts and reentry programs for veterans exiting jail and prison. Despite the high rate of mental health problems among veterans involved in the criminal justice system, it remains unclear what protective factors might buffer or reduce the effect of trauma and psychiatric symptoms. In order to address this gap, the current project explores differences in mental health and trauma exposure among veterans with and without arrest histories and the direct and indirect effects of social support and coping self-efficacy (CSE) on mental health. Based on theory and existing literature, it is hypothesized that CSE will mediate the relationship between social support and mental health regardless of criminal justice status.

Methodology: A pre-experimental, cross-sectional, and exploratory design is used. A convenience sample of adults (18+) who served any length of time in the U.S. Armed Forces was recruited using quota sampling to ensure at least half of the sample were justice involved. Participants were recruited in one city in the Midwestern U.S. Face-to-face interviews were conducted throughout 2016 with 76 military veterans. Participants completed a battery of standardized measures to assess cross cutting psychiatric symptoms, trauma symptoms, post deployment CSE, and multidimensional social support. After missing data were removed, 61 participants were retained in the study. Descriptive and bivariate analyses were conducted for all study variables. Hypotheses were tested using Hayes’ PROCESS 3.0 with bootstrapping for small samples. Participants were, on average, 44 years old and 95% were male. The majority of the sample identified as White (71%) and 43% reported combat exposure. Among justice-involved veterans, participants reported an average of 10 arrests.

Results: Justice-involved veterans reported statistically significantly more psychiatric and trauma symptoms but less social support and CSE compared to veterans without arrests. Mediation models functioned as hypothesized for both psychiatric and trauma symptoms with social support predicting both outcomes. When controlling for CSE in these models, social support remained significant for psychiatric symptoms but less so, b = .27, SE = .12, p =.03, and non-significant for trauma symptoms, b = .20, SE = .12, p = .10, respectively. However, when entering arrest status as a control, CSE remained a significant predictor but the direct effect of social support continued to decrease for both psychiatric, b = .25, SE = .13, p = .05, and trauma symptoms, b = .15, SE = .12, p = .23, respectively.

Implications: Results of the study build knowledge on the different ways social support and CSE protect or buffer psychiatric symptoms among justice-involved veterans. Results inform targeted interventions on the need to enhance CSE to prevent or reduce military veterans’ criminal justice involvement and better serve the needs of justice-involved veterans. Additional research using an experimental design is needed to test the impact of interventions aimed at improving CSE to reduce criminal justice involvement.