Measuring Underemployment among Military Spouses

One of the many aspects of military family quality of life that DoD seeks to monitor and improve is the degree of employment opportunity available to spouses of military members (whom we refer to as military spouses). In advising DoD on how best to measure underemployment among military spouses, we argued in previous work (Lim and Golinelli, 2006) that the Labor Utilization Framework (LUF) is superior to traditional Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) measures of underemployment, such as the unemployment rate. In that work, we also proposed a set of additional survey questions that would provide enough information to construct the LUF measures of underemployment. In response to that research, in 2006 DoD implemented enough survey questions to allow for the construction of some LUF measures (in particular, the measures of labor force position at a given point in time). Thus, this report builds on previous work and applies the LUF measures of labor force position to 2006 data on military wives.