Publication year
2016
Citation Title
Pathways of risk and resilience: Impact of a family resilience program on active-êduty military parents.
Journal Name
Family Process
Journal Volume
55
Issue Number
4
Page Numbers
633-646
DOI
10.1111/famp.12238
Summary
Military families experience unique stressors and may benefit from increases in resilience. Researchers investigated a brief, strengths-based intervention focused on enhancing military family resilience through increased communication, parenting skills, collaboration, flexibility, and routines. They evaluated whether decreases in parent distress after the intervention were due to increases in family resilience. The results indicated that changes in family resilience did explain reductions in parent distress.
Key Findings
Increases in family resilience predicted improvements in military and civilian parents’ mental health.
Military parents’ reports of improvement in family functioning predicted improvements in civilian parents’ mental health, but civilian parents’ reports did not predict military parents’ mental health.
Parents who indicated higher levels of distress before intervention were more likely to experience benefit from the intervention, both individually and as a family.
The number of sessions a family attended was predicted by the distress of the military parent but not by distress of the civilian parent.
Implications for Program Leaders
Offer workshops that aim to increase family communication, collaboration, flexibility, and routines
Engage with Service members in order to recruit and retain families for participation in activities
Identify families with parents who are experiencing higher levels of distress and create targeted efforts to support those families
Implications for Policy Makers
Continue to support the development of programs to increase military family resilience
Encourage professionals who work with individual Service members to consider the role of family functioning in Service member well-being
Recommend that programs for military families focus on recognizing and optimizing family strengths
Methods
Information about how participants were recruited was not included.
Participants completed online surveys to measure emotional distress and family functioning before and after the intervention; distress was re-assessed six months post-intervention.
Clinicians also rated each parent on how well they were functioning in key areas of their lives at the beginning and end of the intervention.
Data were analyzed to determine which changes in scores after the intervention explained decreases in parent distress.
Participants
Participants were 434 families from 14 U.S. Marine Corps and Navy installations.
For 97% of the families, the parents were a male Service member and a female civilian spouse.
On average, there were two children in each family.
Information about race and ethnicity were not included.
Limitations
No information was included regarding recruitment of participants, so it is unclear how these families were chosen to receive the intervention.
No information was included regarding the race and ethnicity of participants, so the populations to which results can be generalized are unclear.
There was no comparison or control group; therefore, it is unknown whether the changes in family resilience and distress were due to participation in the intervention.
Avenues for Future Research
Include a variety of family structures and gender roles (i.e., families with a female Service member)
Compare families receiving the intervention to families not receiving the intervention to determine what changes in family resilience are a direct result of the intervention
Investigate the effects of using a strength-based intervention to increase family resilience shortly before deployment
Focus
Multiple Branches
Population Focus
Military Component
Abstract
Over the past decade, studies into the impact of wartime deployment and related adversities on service members and their families have offered empirical support for systemic models of family functioning and a more nuanced understanding of the mechanisms by which stress and trauma reverberate across family and partner relationships. They have also advanced our understanding of the ways in which families may contribute to the resilience of children and parents contending with the stressors of serial deployments and parental physical and psychological injuries. This study is the latest in a series designed to further clarify the systemic functioning of military families and to explicate the role of resilient family processes in reducing symptoms of distress and poor adaptation among family members. Drawing upon the implementation of the Families Overcoming Under Stress (FOCUS) Family Resilience Program at 14 active-duty military installations across the United States, structural equation modeling was conducted with data from 434 marine and navy active-duty families who participated in the FOCUS program. The goal was to better understand the ways in which parental distress reverberates across military family systems and, through longitudinal path analytic modeling, determine the pathways of program impact on parental distress. The findings indicated significant cross-influence of distress between the military and civilian parents within families, families with more distressed military parents were more likely to sustain participation in the program, and reductions in distress among both military and civilian parents were significantly mediated by improvements in resilient family processes. These results are consistent with family systemic and resilient models that support preventive interventions designed to enhance family resilient processes as an important part of comprehensive services for distressed military families.
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