Family resilience in the military

Sarah O. Meadows, Megan K. Beckett, Kirby Bowling, Daniela Golinelli, Michael P. Fisher, Laurie T. Martin, Lisa S. Meredith, Karen Chan Osilla, Rand Corporation

"Military life presents a variety of challenges to military families, including frequent separations and relocations as well as the risks that service members face during deployment; however, many families successfully navigate these challenges. Despite a recent emphasis on family resilience, the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) does not have a standard and universally accepted definition of family resilience. A standard definition is a necessary for DoD to more effectively assess its efforts to sustain and improve family resilience. RAND authors reviewed the literature on family resilience and, in this report, recommend a definition that could be used DoD-wide. The authors also reviewed DoD policies related to family resilience, reviewed models that describe family resilience and identified key family resilience factors, and developed several recommendations for how family-resilience...