Family Communication Patterns and Adolescent Experiences During Parental Military Deployment and Reintegration: The Role of Inappropriate Parental Disclosures and Perceived Family Understanding

Abstract

This study examines associations between adolescent reports of family communication patterns (FCPs) and difficulties experienced during the deployment and reintegration of a military parent. Data from 106 adolescents (9–17 years) in 72 National Guard families where a parent had recently returned from overseas deployment were analyzed to examine direct and indirect links between FCPs, perceived family understanding, inappropriate parental disclosures, and adolescent difficulties. Results indicate direct effects for conformity orientation, with it being inversely associated with adolescent difficulties during both deployment and reintegration. Conversation orientation exerts mixed effects on adolescent difficulties during deployment. At a trend level, conversation orientation shares a direct, negative association with adolescent difficulties during deployment but also an indirect, positive association via family inappropriate parental disclosures. Implications of the findings for future research on FCPs as well as programs working with military families are discussed.

Keywords:

• Family Communication Patterns
• Family Understanding
• Inappropriate Disclosures
• Military Deployment
• Military Youth
• Resiliency

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the Military Family Research Institute at Purdue University for their assistance and support throughout this project.

Notes

1. For conformity orientation, Items 9 and 17 from the original RFCP measure were removed, and, for conversation orientation, Items 8 and 10 were removed.

2. The PNEM also includes four items assessing potentially positive experiences so as not to focus entirely on negative aspects of parental deployment; however, these items involve diverse experiences that could occur during deployment or reintegration. Positive items are not intended to form a composite scale and are not included in the PNEM composite measure used in this study.

3. The maximum likelihood with missing values estimation (MLMV) method uses multiple imputation to estimate missing values (StataCorp, 2015).

4. MacKinnon et al. (2002) explain the calculation of the standard error for significance testing. The authors state, “The variance-covariance matrix of the correlation coefficients is pre- and post-multiplied by the vector of partial derivatives to calculate a standard error that can be used to test the significance of the intervening variable effect” (p. 90).