Publication year
2016
Citation Title
Family members as boundary managers: Behaviors that promote and limit service members' involvement in daily family life.
Journal Name
Journal of Child and Family Studies
Journal Volume
25
Issue Number
9
Page Numbers
2808-2819
DOI
10.1007/s10826-016-0443-4
Summary
Families must balance closeness and distance in boundaries with a deployed family member in order to maintain a relationship and cope with the separation in healthy ways. Family members and Reservists were interviewed about behaviors that either promoted or limited Reservists' involvement in family life. Generally, besides separated couples, family members worked hard to keep themselves and their children connected with the Reservist during deployment.
Key Findings
Family relationships were facilitated through contact (e.g., care packages, letters, calls), child reminders (e.g., homecoming countdown calendar, coloring pictures for the Reservist), and Reservist reminders (e.g., child’s pictures, updates on child).
Family members promoted Reservists’ involvement by soliciting their opinions during decisions.
Many family members unintentionally limited Reservists’ family involvement by assuming responsibilities and withholding information that might upset the Reservist during deployment.
Implications for Program Leaders
Educate families about how to redistribute responsibilities post-deployment by teaching healthy communication and negotiation skills
Offer workshops for Service members post-deployment to discuss how new ways of coping and managing boundaries with family may be more adaptive than those used during deployment
Provide programs for family members of deployed Service members to offer ideas and engage in activities (e.g., preparing care packages, children coloring pictures) to maintain communication
Implications for Policy Makers
Encourage research on the development of new modes of communication for deployed Service members and their families
Continue to support programs that help family members cope with separation from a deployed Service member
Promote the development of programs that encourage military families to plan ahead about and discuss communication and responsibilities during deployment
Methods
Army Reservists, who had deployed in OIF from 2003-2004, and their family members were recruited at family support groups, unit headquarters, and via mail, with an 11% response rate.
Two weeks post-deployment, Reservists and family members completed an interview about family dynamics during deployment and strategies for adjusting to separation.
Behaviors that limited or promoted Reservists’ involvement in family life during deployment were coded.
Participants
The 28 participants included 13 Army Reservists (85% male), with an average age of 28.62 years (SD = 8.49), and 15 family members (93% female), with an average age of 39.12 (SD = 13.11).
Participants were primarily White (89%); family members were Reservists’ spouses (53%), fiancés (13%), mothers (27%), and a grandmother (7%).
Most Reservists had children (54%), had civilian employment (85%), and had only experienced one deployment (77%); all were enlisted and had served an average of 7.41 years in the military.
Limitations
Results from the small, self-selected Army Reservist sample may not generalize to other military families.
Interactions during deployment were retrospectively reported, potentially decreasing accuracy of the results.
With several advances in technology since 2003-2004, interactions between deployed Service members and their families may now be quite different than at the time of the study.
Avenues for Future Research
Examine how different strategies of promoting or limiting deployed family members’ involvement in family life impacts family functioning and family member well-being
Explore Service members’ preferences about the amount and types of information they would like to receive from their families during deployment
Investigate the positive and negative mental health impacts of hiding information to protect other family members by both deployed Service members and their families
Focus
Army
Target Population
Population Focus
Military Branch
Military Component
Abstract
When military service members deploy, they move outside the immediate boundary of their families. However, because boundaries are permeable, service members remain a psychological part of their families in spite of their physical absence. The extent of service members’ continued involvement in daily family life is likely tied to their non-deployed family members’ actions to manage this boundary. In the current study, we were interested in identifying non-deployed family members’ actions to either promote, or limit, service members’ involvement in daily family life during deployment. These actions by family members constitute boundary management behaviors. We collected qualitative data from a sample of Army reservists (N = 13) and their household family members (N = 15). Findings indicated that family members used a variety of boundary management behaviors during deployment, some of which promoted reservists’ involvement, and others which limited it. In addition, boundary management behaviors varied by who they targeted, their intentionality, and their implications for reservists’ well-being. Findings illustrate the value in equipping military families with language that enables them to communicate openly about the significance of their boundary management behavior over the course of deployment so that they may arrive at a balance between stretching and restricting boundaries that best suits their unique needs.
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