The Development and Validation of the Army Post-Deployment Reintegration Scale

Abstract

For military personnel, the post-deployment period can be associated with changes affecting their quality of life, the quality of their close relationships, and their attitudes concerning their military careers. There is, however, little published research concerning this process, and a major weakness of the previous work is the lack of an established measuring instrument. This article describes the development of the Army Post-deployment Reintegration Scale assessing the attitudes of military personnel in three key areas. Study 1 found support for a multidimensional model of post-deployment reintegration attitudes. Study 2 refined the dimensionality of the model to the positive and negative aspects of personal, family, and work reintegration and reduced the length of the scale to 36 items and provided preliminary evidence of its factorial validity and internal consistency reliabilities. Finally, in Study 3, the subscales were correlated in predicted ways with personal- and organizational-level outcomes (e.g., posttraumatic stress disorder [PTSD], organizational commitment).

Notes

¹Although these positive attitudes or benefits are associated with the deployment experience rather than with the post-deployment experience per se, we refer to them as post-deployment reintegration attitudes because they are reflected upon after returning home.

²We use an alpha level of .05 throughout except when otherwise noted.

³Because this is not the final iteration of the APDRS, and to save space, item-based descriptive statistics and factor loadings are not provided for data from this study. That information is available, however, by contacting the corresponding author.

⁴We do not report the proportion of veterans in the combat arms, because this information was not available for these data.

⁵See note 3.

⁶Allen and Meyer's model also involves normative commitment, feelings of obligation to remain in an organization; however, this measure has been used even more infrequently in military samples and to date has not produced clear results (see Allen, 2003).