Comparing Advice from Military Parents, Partners, and Veterans about How Families Can Encourage Service Members to Seek Behavioral Health care

ABSTRACT

This study compared advice that three groups—military parents, partners, and Veterans—gave regarding how military families can encourage service members (SMs) to seek professional help when needed. Based on identity implications theory and the normative model of social support, common themes regarding how families might pursue task, relational, and identity goals were expected (RQ₁). Based on their unique positions, we investigated whether the three groups stressed different themes (RQ₂). Military parents (n = 51), partners (n = 74), and Veterans (n = 112) read a scenario in which a SM was having difficulty reintegrating after deployment; all three groups offered advice about how military families should handle similar situations. Common themes regarding task, relational, and identity goals emerged in the advice from all three groups; however, parents, partners, and Veterans also differed significantly in how often they mentioned six themes. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

Acknowledgment

The authors would like to thank Purdue University’s Military Family Research Institute for assistance with recruiting. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the annual meeting of the National Communication Association, Nov. 2017, Dallas TX.

Notes

¹ We use the term “service member” (SM) when referring to anyone who has served in the post-9/11 conflicts, regardless of whether they are part of the U.S. military (active duty or Guard/Reserves) or are now military Veterans.

² Some of the data on advice given by military partners and parents have been published previously in Wilson et al. (2015b); however, that study did not quantitatively content analyze all of the advice given by partners and parents nor did it draw comparisons between partners and parents. Advice from military Veterans has not been published before.

³ We took several steps to ensure that participants actually were military parents, partners, or Veterans. In addition to using recruitment procedures that targeted these populations, responses were excluded if survey completion took less than 10 min, information about military service was incomplete, less than half of closed-ended items were completed, more than two surveys originated from the same IP address, the IP address was from China, India, Russia, or Eastern Europe (because of the low likelihood that U.S. military families or Veterans were responding from these locations), and/or open-ended prompts did not demonstrate a reasonable grasp of English grammar or word usage.

⁴ In the initial study (Wilson et al., 2015a), parents or partners randomly assigned to one of the four different scenarios did not differ significantly in their ratings of perceived scenario realism nor in their importance ratings for task, relational, or identity goals; ratings of levels of acceptance and autonomy support in written messages also did not vary across scenarios. In the follow-up study, Veterans randomly assigned to one of the two different scenarios did not differ in their ratings of perceived scenario realism or in their rating of the perceived level of acceptance or autonomy support expressed by parents or partners.

⁵ Fifty-one out of the total 91 parents (56%) from Wilson et al. (2015a) answered the open-ended question about what advice they would give to military families, as did 74 out of the total 100 spouses/partners (74%). One hundred and twelve out of the 226 Veterans (49%) from the follow-up study answered the open-ended question concerning what advice they would give to military families.

⁶ For parents and partners, the number of pieces of advice they offered did not differ across the four scenarios, F(3, 47) = 1.04, ns, and F(3, 67) = .17, ns, respectively. Likewise, for Veterans, the number of pieces of advice they offered did not vary across the two scenarios, t(110) = −.52, ns.

⁷ The following six categories were dropped due to low frequencies: “don’t delay,” “be calm,” “use pressure,” “pray,” “seek information online,” and “it depends.” For all six categories, fewer than 5% of at least one group (parents, partners, or Veterans) gave this advice, and in all but one case, fewer than 5% of two groups gave it. These six categories ultimately were included in the “other” category to maintain the exhaustiveness of the coding system. In addition, three low frequency categories—“frame it cooperatively,” “normalize it,” and “frame it positively”—were combined together into a single new “reframe help seeking” theme because all three involved reframing and could be coded reliably once combined (see Table 2).

⁸ To group themes in terms of goals, we assessed how the content of each theme might be relevant to one or more goals. For example, because encouraging a SM to seek help presumes that there must be some reason why the SM needs help, we listed the theme “be specific about problems” as a “task-goal theme.”

⁹ Although arbitrary, this 10% threshold ensured that “common” themes were mentioned by more than a few members of each group while also reducing the number of categories. For example, if the threshold had been lowered to 5% for all three groups, then 12 of the 14 categories would have been considered “common.” If the threshold had instead been raised to 20%, then only one “common” category would have been identified.