Assessing personal and family strengths among active-duty military members to predict self-directed harm and interpersonal violence

Abstract: United States active-duty military members face elevated risk of self-directed harm and interpersonal violence. Prevention resources for family maltreatment in the military context have received notable investments in recent years, culminating in the development of the Personal and Family Strengths Inventory (PFSI), a strengths-based prevention and treatment-planning tool aimed at inventorying key dimensions of individuals' formal supports, informal supports, family environment, individual fitness, and personal resilience. Research has showcased the utility of the holistic assessment of factors captured by the PFSI, with implications for predicting the perpetration of family maltreatment, broadly speaking, among active-duty members. The purpose of the current study was to assess the capacity of PFSI indicators, distinctly and in combination with each other, to predict other forms of self-directed harm and specific types of interpersonal violence that the U.S. military endeavors to prevent. Leveraging a representative sample of 30,187 active-duty Air Force members who had at least one child and were in a committed relationship, results from weighted regression models indicated that latent profiles marked by low scores across PFSI dimensions were associated with higher predicted probabilities of partner physical perpetration, child physical perpetration, child emotional perpetration, partner physical victimization, partner emotional victimization, suicidality, hazardous alcohol consumption, prescription drug misuse, illicit drug use, and non-suicidal self-harm. Moreover, almost without exception, there were significant standardized mean differences for all PFSI dimension scores between military members who did and did not report each indicator of self-directed harm or interpersonal violence. Taken together, the PFSI appears well positioned as an integrative prevention tool for use in numerous prevention settings, ultimately to promote the health and well-being of military-connected individuals and families. The PFSI could be embedded in various practice settings to support a multitude of prevention efforts and be used to inform broader base-specific, branch-specific, or military-wide policy directives.