M.M. Smith, an active-duty military spouse, writes about relating on a personal level to the RAND Corporation's recently released Deployment Life Study.
The study's findings immediately took me back to 2013, the year my husband was first deployed to Afghanistan. He's in the Air Force, and we had done the long-distance relationship dance before. But deployment adds layers of stress that might be hard for outsiders to see.
Anxiety ramps up during the pre-deployment stage and continues to be heightened during deployment, according to the RAND study. Researchers followed multiple members of the same military family, collecting information at four-month intervals over three years, following about 2,700 families who experienced deployments between 2011 to 2015. In their responses, I saw my own family....
The remainder of this commentary is available on Military.com's SpouseBUZZ.
This commentary originally appeared on SpouseBUZZ on July 13, 2016, under the title, “I Saw My Own Family In This Study.”
Commentary gives RAND researchers a platform to convey insights based on their professional expertise and often on their peer-reviewed research and analysis.
