Associations Between Prior Deployments and Marital Satisfaction Among Army Couples

• Author: Benjamin R. Karney,Thomas E. Trail
• Published date: 01 February 2017
• Date: 01 February 2017
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/jomf.12329

B R. K University of California, Los Angeles

T E. T RAND Corporation∗

Associations Between Prior Deployments and

Marital Satisfaction Among Army Couples

Although the experience of deployments has

been described as devastating to married

life, evidence linking deployments directly to

poorer marital functioning has been sparse. The

analyses described in this article compare asso-

ciations between prior deployments and current

marital satisfaction across four differentways of

measuring prior deployment within a large and

representative sample of married Army service

members and their spouses. Results indicate

that the experience of prior deployments is

associated with signicantly lower current

marital satisfaction among military couples.

The association is disproportionately strong for

rst deployments and rst cumulative months

of deployment and weakens over subsequent

deployment experiences. Most of these asso-

ciations, but not all, can be accounted for by

the fact that service members who have been

deployed are more likely to have experienced

traumatic events and to experience posttrau-

matic stress disorder symptoms, both of which

are independently associated with lower levels

of marital satisfaction.

Since the onset of military operations in Iraq

and Afghanistan, deployments have been

Department of Psychology, Universityof California,

Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA 90095

(karney@psych.ucla.edu).

∗RAND Corporation, 1200 South Hayes Street, Arlington,

VA22202.

Key Words: deployment, marital quality, military families,

posttraumatic stress disorder, stress.

more frequent and more dangerous than in prior

decades (Hosek & Martorell, 2009). Even before

the most recent conicts, military families con-

sidered deployments to be the most stressful

aspects of military service (Rosen & Durand,

2000). Accordingly, conventionalwisdom holds

that deployments damage military marriages and

that the past decade’s deployments have been

particularly damaging (Newby et al., 2005).

In keeping with these concerns, policymakers

have directed substantial resources toward pro-

grams to assist military families in managing

the demands of deployment and reintegration

(Rubin & Harvie, 2012).

Yet, despite the widespread perception that

deployments are associated with less successful

military marriages, empirical evidence of this

association has been sparse and inconsistent. At

least part of this inconsistency can be attributed

to the wide variability across studies in the

samples addressed, the ways that deployments

have been measured, and the marital outcomes

considered. The goal of the current study is

to rene our understanding of the associations

between deployments and marital outcomes

through analyses of the baseline assessment of

the Deployment Life Study, an ongoing study

of married, deployable service members and

their families (Tanielian, Karney, Chandra, &

Meadows, 2014).

W S D A

M

Despite agreement that deployments are a sig-

nicant and impactful part of military life, there

Journal of Marriage and Family 79 (February 2017): 147–160 147

DOI:10.1111/jomf.12329