The Resilience of Military Families: Theoretical perspectives

Abstract: This chapter addresses military family resilience in today's Active and Reserve Components— the US Armed Forces that emerged from the 1990s and a period of profound and stressful downsizing (in the overall number of military bases, units, and people) and were thrown into an unexpected decade of war. Our focus is on married service members with and without dependent children in the home as well as single service members with dependent children in the home. In addition, we focus on the resilience of the family as a group. In agreement with Patterson (2002), this requires a shift in the unit of analysis from the individual to a system level that involves two or more family members. We review three theories that provide perspectives on the capacity of military families (defined here as Afghanistan and Iraq War era military families) to demonstrate resilience. The first two theories are larger conceptual frameworks in the field of family studies: life course theory (sometimes referred to as life course perspective) and symbolic interactionism. The third, family stress theory, emerged directly from the study of military families in crisis (e.g.. Hill, 1949). We examine how each theory addresses one or more of the four dimensions that Hawley and DeHaan (1996) associate with variation in the capacity of families to demonstrate resilience: "context, developmental level, the interactive combination of risk and protective factors, and the family's shared outlook'. Limitations in the application of these perspectives are discussed, in particular, the lack of attention to the broader community context. We then offer a theory of community action and change, which effectively examines military family resilience in the context of the formal and informal community networks in which military families are embedded. This community perspective shifts the focus to include larger contextual effects that frame and inform military family resilience