Abstract
Although researchers have examined the 6–12 month period after which service members return home from an overseas deployment, their studies often focus on members’ mental and physical health (e.g., whether or not the member is displaying symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder or a minor traumatic brain injury). In this chapter, we take a different approach to the post-deployment reintegration period, focusing instead on the positive and negative experiences and perceptions associated with three domains that returning service members have told us are important: reintegrating back into a garrison work environment, reintegrating back into one’s family, and integrating the deployment experiences into one’s personal identity. In addition, the chapter describes the development and validation of the Post-Deployment Reintegration Scale (PDRS), which we created to support our research, as well as the construction and use of norms for the PDRS. Finally, we focus on single service members, looking at the degree to which marital status and whether or not someone has dependents influence the post-deployment reintegration experiences and perceptions captured by the PDRS.
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Notes
- 1.
To get the large sample sizes of deployed CF members required to develop and validate the PDRS, we received permission to include the scale in the CF’s post-deployment Human Dimensions of Operations (HDO) survey, a large, regularly given omnibus set of questionnaires designed to give CF commanders a broad overview of a wide range of potential post-deployment personnel issues (e.g., Brown, 2005a, 2005b, 2005c). Including the PDRS in the post-deployment HDO survey was desirable for two reasons. First, our team felt that individuals needed time to adjust; time to develop post-deployment reintegration-related experiences and perceptions. As we had little information about how that process worked, we felt that the timing provided by the HDO survey was an appropriate starting point. Second, the HDO survey also included other measures that we could use to assess the validity of the PDRS.
- 2.
Before beginning our data analyses, we screened the data for univariate normality, outliers, and assessed missing data (Kline, 2010). None of the PDRS scale items met Kline’s criteria for excessive skewness or kurtosis. To check for outliers we standardized items and noted any with absolute values greater than 3.29. Responses to items 1, 9, 16, and 27 contained outliers. We used the Windsor technique (Kline, 2010) to trim values that had absolute z-score values greater than 3.29 back to the next highest score, eliminating all item-level outliers. In all, 330 of the 3,006 participants had missing data on some of the PDRS items. To minimize missing data, we computed the mean for each subscale if participants had completed at least half the items in the subscale. We next assessed each subscale for normality and used the Windsor technique to trim back scores on the Personal Negative subscale. Third, we excluded cases which had no score on at least one of the subscales, resulting in 2,974 valid cases for each sub-scale (i.e., 32 excluded cases).
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Acknowledgements
The authors wish to thank Dr. Megan Thompson, who is a co-creator of the Post-Deployment Reintegration Scale. We also thank Dr. Angela Febbraro and Dr. Donna Pickering for their assistance in the initial stage of the scale’s development, Major Gary Ivey for his help with the data used in this chapter, as well as the many members of the Canadian Forces (especially those in the Personnel Selection Branch) who helped and encouraged us in this endeavor.
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McCreary, D.R., Peach, J.M., Blais, AR., Fikretoglu, D. (2014). Towards a Better Understanding of Post-Deployment Reintegration. In: MacDermid Wadsworth, S., Riggs, D. (eds) Military Deployment and its Consequences for Families. Risk and Resilience in Military and Veteran Families. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8712-8_10
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