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Families Under Stress

An Assessment of Data, Theory, and Research on Marriage and Divorce in the Military

by Benjamin Karney, John S. Crown

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Recent demands on the military have raised concerns about the impact of extended deployments on military marriages. To evaluate this impact, the authors draw on marital status data in service personnel records to estimate trends in marriage and marital dissolution between 1996 and 2005 and the specific effects of time deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq on subsequent risk of ending a marriage. The results generally run counter to expectations. Although rates of marital dissolution have increased since 2001 for most services and components, they had declined in the five years prior to 2001. As a result, marital dissolution rates across the services and components are currently similar to those observed in 1996, when the demands on the military were measurably lower. In most cases, service members who were deployed had a lower risk of subsequently ending their marriages than service members who did not deploy or deployed fewer days.

Table of Contents

  • Chapter One

    Introduction

  • Chapter Two

    Developing Models of Military Marriage

  • Chapter Three

    Review of Empirical Research on Military Marriages

  • Chapter Four

    Trends in Marriage and Divorce: Reanalyzing Military Service Personnel Records

  • Chapter Five

    Evaluating Alternative Explanations for Rising Rates of Marital Dissolution in the Military

  • Chapter Six

    The Direct Effects of Deployments on Marital Dissolution

  • Chapter Seven

    Conclusions and Future Directions for Research and Policy

  • Appendix

    Marriage and Marital Dissolution Tables

Research conducted by

The research described in this report was prepared for the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD). The research was conducted in the RAND National Defense Research Institute, a federally funded research and development center sponsored by the OSD, the Joint Staff, the Unified Combatant Commands, the Department of the Navy, the Marine Corps, the defense agencies, and the defense Intelligence Community.

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