Assessing Personal and Family Strengths Among Active-Duty Military Members to Predict Self-Directed Harm and Interpersonal Violence

Background and Purpose: Active-duty military members face elevated risk of self-directed harm and interpersonal violence. The development of prevention resources for family maltreatment in the military context has received notable attention in recent years, culminating in the development of the Personal and Family Strengths Inventory (PFSI), a strengths-based prevention and treatment-planning tool aimed at inventorying key dimensions of individuals’ formal supports, informal supports, family environment, individual fitness, and personal resilience. Related research has showcased the utility of the holistic assessment of factors captured by the PFSI, with implications for predicting the perpetration of family maltreatment among active-duty members. This study assesses the capacity of PFSI indicators to predict other forms of self-directed harm and specific types of interpersonal violence that the military endeavors to prevent.

Methods: Our analytical sample included 30,187 active-duty Air Force members from the 2011 AF Community Assessment Survey who had at least one child and were in a committed relationship. We prepared binary variables indicating whether participants reported any of the following: perpetration of partner physical maltreatment, perpetration of child physical maltreatment, perpetration of child emotional maltreatment, receipt of physical maltreatment from partner, receipt of emotional maltreatment from partner, suicidality, hazardous alcohol consumption, prescription drug misuse, illicit drug use, and non-suicidal self-harm. Earlier latent profile analyses identified five distinct patterns of personal and family strengths in this sample, labeled low strengths, below average strengths, mixed strengths, above average strengths, and high strengths. We used the pattern-specific conditional probability values as focal predictors in weighted logistic regression models for each outcome variable, alongside covariates (i.e., stepfamily status, age of youngest child, biological sex, age, paygrade, deployment status). Predicted probabilities for each outcome were then estimated for each pattern of personal and family strengths.

Results: The low strengths pattern was associated with outcome probabilities notably higher than sample-average levels. Especially high were probabilities of any risk outcome (57.7%), any maltreatment (41.0%), partner emotional victimization (30.0%), suicidality (16.0%), and hazardous alcohol consumption (14.5%). Moving to the below average strengths pattern, predicted probabilities related to self-directed harm moved closer to sample-mean levels; however, predicted probabilities related to any family maltreatment remained above sample-mean levels (22.0%), as did the predicted probability for any risk outcome (31.6%). The mixed strengths pattern yielded predicted probabilities near sample-mean levels, although probabilities associated with partner physical victimization (0.5%) and partner emotional victimization (2.8%) were markedly lower than sample-mean levels. Predicted probabilities of each risk outcome were appreciably lower than sample-mean levels for the above average strengths and high strengths patterns.

Conclusions and Implications: The PFSI is well positioned as an integrative prevention tool for use in numerous prevention settings, ultimately to promote the health and well-being of military-connected individuals and families. The PFSI could be embedded in various practice settings to support a multitude of prevention efforts. The PFSI could also be used to inform broader base-specific, branch-specific, or military wide policy directives. Although our data come from active-duty Air Force members, we believe the PFSI could be applied well by all military branches.