Demographics, Military Status, and Physical Health as Indicators of Personal Resilience Among U.S. Active Duty Service M
Personal resilience refers to the ability to constructively adjust and move forward with ones’ life following tragic events or situations. However, few studies have examined the characteristics of highly resilient active duty military or veterans. This st
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Abstract Personal resilience refers to the ability to constructively adjust and move forward with ones’ life following tragic events or situations. However, few studies have examined the characteristics of highly resilient active duty military or veterans. This study examined the relationships between personal resiliency scores (The Resiliency Scale), demographics, general Self-Reported Health (SRH), and health symptomatology (Patient Health Questionnaire-15) among 263 U.S. active duty and veteran service members. Pearson Product-Moment Correlations, an Analysis of Variance, and Regression Analysis were used with a significance level of 0.05. Results showed that active duty service members were more resilient than the veterans in this population (p < 0.05). Findings also demonstrated that a higher education level, longer time on active duty, higher SRH, and lower symptomology were correlated with (p < 0.05) and contributed to greater resilience [F(4, 258) = 26.18, p < 0.01), R2 = 0.54]. These results demonstrate the importance of health and education, perhaps pointing toward a protective qualities that may also include longer service time. Keywords Resilience Education
Military Health Symptomology Time-in-service
1 Introduction When describing material that is ‘resilient’, it is said that it has the quality of being able to return to its’ original shape after being stretched, pulled, or otherwise manipulated into a shape different from its’ normal state. Using this description, a V.J. Rice (&) Army Research Laboratory HRED AMEDD Field Element, 2950 Koehler Rd, Suite 1099, Ft. Sam Houston, San Antonio, TX 78234-7731, USA e-mail: [email protected] B. Liu DCS Corporation, Alexandria, VA, USA © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2017 V.G. Duffy and N. Lightner (eds.), Advances in Human Factors and Ergonomics in Healthcare, Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing 482, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-41652-6_40
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rubber band is resilient. The term resilience has been adapted to refer to individuals, teams, organizations and governments [1]. Personal resilience refers to an individuals’ capacity to return to one’s original state, or close to it, by positively adjusting and continuing forward momentum in one’s life following trauma or significant hardship [2, 3], and to do so while maintaining acceptable functional, social, and psychological capabilities [3]. Personal resilience is of great interest to the U.S. military [4]. Military service members face adversity during deployments into harms’ way, including possible death and physical injury (their own or that of others), as well as long durations away from family and support systems, dealing with different cultures, and austere climates and living conditions. The families of service members also face challenges as they confront the possibility of the death or injury to their family member, handling daily life stressors without one parent, and frequent “starting over” in making new friends, finding new housing, an
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