Military spouses are an important part of the United States military services and essential to the Department of Defense (Keller et. al, 2018). A military spouse’s satisfaction in the quality of life afforded during their spouse’s service impacts service member retention rates (Lubens and Bruckner, 2018). Family dysfunction and distress can negatively impact a service member’s focus on the military mission and prevent deployment (Schneider and Martin, 1994). Military spouses are considered ‘keystones’ to military family health (Green et. al., 2013).
The “You Are More Than READY-ness” multi-level resiliency-building campaign focused on building resiliency for spouses of United States Marine Corps service members. The need to focus on a service-specific set of military spouses became imperative once initial efforts were made into building the initiative. Each of the services has its own culture, and in the Marine Corps, “every Marine a rifleman” is the prevailing cultural identity, and value base (CAOCL, 2019). The resiliency intervention designers believed this major cultural difference would ultimately require small, but significant differences in the needs of service spouses. Therefore, this resiliency chose to focus solely on USMC spouses. However, the design is formatted for easy replication across the major services.
The intervention promotes resiliency at each of the four levels of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention Social-Ecological Model (CDC, 2021). At the individual level, the intervention publishes a reading list titled “Books (written by military spouses) that every military spouse should read”. The intent of this level of intervention is to advocate for increased self-awareness through individual study.
At the relationship level, the intervention promotes attendance of the "You're More Than READY-ness" peer leadership training. This peer leadership training program provides skills for positively influencing peer spouses, encourages peer spouses to promote positivity across online military spouse communities, and distributes information on organizations with missions to support military spouses. The intervention believes this peer leadership training will strengthen relationships between spouses, which is vital as military spouse anxiety, depression, and stress increase during times of deployment (Bailey, 2018).
While the intervention medium at the community and societal level is the same, the content and objectives are different. At both levels, the intervention proposes the initiation of a podcast. The podcast will publish new episodes bi-weekly (twice a month), with the first podcast episode of each month focusing content on the community level and the second of the month focusing on the societal level. Content for the community level will primarily present military spouses making a difference in the military spouse community. The objective for this level is to advertise and promote these organizations and encourage military spouses to support their missions.
The Podcast for the societal level will generally feature military spouse businesses that have become successes outside of the military community. These societal topics will discuss the processes the business owners implemented to achieve success, and how the fact that their spouses were military members hindered or helped those processes. The overarching objective is to demonstrate that success is possible even with many of the unknowns the military spouse life brings. These podcasts will eventually allow interested listeners to call in and ask questions of these successful military spouse business owners and receive advice, which will expand the objective to creating a conduit for advice from individuals with similar circumstances.
To measure the efficacy of this resiliency initiative, the developers will utilize the data from an already existing military spouse survey performed by the Department of Defense Office of People Analytics. This survey bi-annually (every two years) gathers information on military spouse support and spouse well-being, amongst other topics (OPA, 2020). The primary indicator of intervention efficacy will be a statistically significant rise in satisfaction with the military lifestyle and a lower average level of distress among USMC spouses.
REFERENCES
Bailey, T. (2018.) The Relationship Between Military Deployment and Spouses’ Anxiety, Depression, and Stress. [Doctoral dissertation, Walden University]. Scholarworks. Accessed 2 August 2021. https://scholarworks.waldenu.e...ontext=dissertations
Center for Advanced Operational Culture Learning. (2019.) Insights from the Marine Corps Organizational Culture Research: Implicit and Explicit Perceptions of Fairness. Accessed 1 August 2021. https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/AD1079415.pdf
Center for Disease Control and Prevention. (2021.) Violence Prevention: The Social-Ecological Model. Accessed: 1 August 2021. https://www.cdc.gov/violencepr...ecologicalmodel.html
Green, S., Lester, P., Nurius, P. (2013). Spouse Psychological Well-Being: A Keystone to Military Family Health. J Hum Behav Soc Environ, 23(6), https://doi.org/10.1080/10911359.2013.795068
Keller, K., Hall, K., Matthews, M., Payne, L., Saum-Manning, L., Yeung, D., Schulker, D., Zavislan, S., Lim, N. Addressing Barriers to Female Officer Retention in the Air Force. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation; 2018. https://www.rand.org/pubs/rese..._reports/RR2073.html
Lubens, P., & Bruckner, T. A. (2018). A Review of Military Health Research Using a Social-Ecological Framework. American journal of health promotion: AJHP, 32(4), 1078–1090. https://doi.org/10.1177/0890117117744849
Office of People Analytics. (2020.) https://opa.defense.gov/. Accessed 28 July 2021. https://download.militaryoneso...fing-508-Revised.pdf
Schneider R., Martin J. Military families and combat readiness. In: Davis LB, Mathews Quick C, Siegel SE, editors. Military Psychiatry: Preparing in Peace for War. Washington, DC: TMM; 1994. pp. 19–30.
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