FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS ABOUT THE OPERATION MILITARY EXPERIENCE (OPERATION ME)

Operation Military Experience (Operation ME) is a nationwide study to learn about adolescents who, as a young child, had a parent deploy after 9/11. We plan to speak with a nationally representative sample of families with two adolescents who had this experience. As always, participation is completely voluntary.

Led by the Military Family Research Institute (MFRI) at Purdue University, the study team includes investigators from the Nathanson Family Resilience Center at the University of California Los Angeles (NFRC), the Naval Health Research Center (NHRC) and Utah State University (USU).

Previously, MFRI and NHRC conducted a study investigating how children younger than 10 were faring as their families experienced multiple deployments. Now, we want to learn how adolescents that experienced parental deployment as young children after 9/11 are faring.

The post-9/11 era of military service has created unique demands for military families. Because of these demands, military families of the post-9/11 era are exposed to a wide variety of stressors. More often than in earlier conflicts, deployed individuals could have been either a mother or a father. Children in military families experience a parent’s deployment in different ways, and they respond to it differently depending on a variety of factors. Adolescence is a time when young people make decisions about potentially risky actions that can affect how they function as adults. We want to understand how early exposure to deployment stressors may influence the choices these children make as adolescents.

We worked with the Defense Manpower Data Center to identify families with adolescent sibling pairs who experienced deployment as young children. From that list, we are randomly selecting families with two children between the ages of 11 and 16 years old who experienced deployment as young children.

Not a problem—We expect that at least half of the families in this study will no longer have someone in the military.

If you agree to participate, we will ask both adolescents and each parent to complete an electronic survey and a telephone interview. This will happen twice, once immediately after selection and again in about a year. We will also request your permission to obtain administrative records about your family’s deployment history and use of services. By accessing those, we may skip asking you detailed questions about events that happened a long time ago.

Two adolescents in each family will participate in surveys and interviews, just as the parents will. Other children will not be involved in this study.

For the first wave of data collection, we will pay each person $15 for completing the first survey and $25 for finishing the first interview. We will send your compensation after all family members have completed all wave-one tasks. One year later, we will increase the compensation by $5, making it $20 for the survey and $30 for the interview. Again, we will send this compensation after the family has completed all of the wave-two tasks.

The risks involved in this study are minimal, not exceeding those you encounter in daily life. You or one of your family members may experience some feelings of distress from thinking about experiences that were troubling.

While a breach of confidentiality is and always will be a risk in research surveys and interviews, we have put extensive safeguards in place to minimize this possibility. No data goes on paper, where it could be misplaced, lost or stolen. Instead, both the interview and survey data go directly into a database with certified security protocols that meet military standards.

Although many people enjoy talking about their experiences, your family may not receive any direct benefit from this study. However, your participation will contribute to a growing knowledge base of the longer-term impact of deployment on military families, making it possible to more effectively support families who serve.

We will disseminate findings from this study throughout civilian and military communities using presentations, reports and journal articles. MFRI may use this information to enhance our own outreach efforts, and we expect that similar organizations and service providers may do the same. As an example, the Nathanson Family Resilience Center, one of our study partners, operates Project FOCUS. This project is one of the largest resiliency programs in the military, serving over 100,000 people annually. The center has a long history of using findings from new research to improve the effectiveness of its programming.

Thank you for your willingness to participate. However, to make sure our sample represents the broader population of military families, we cannot accept volunteers. To participate, your family needs to be randomly selected from the list we obtained from the Defense Manpower Data Center. See the question “How do you select families for this research project?” for more information.

Simply email us at opme@purude.edu or complete this expression of interest form and we will give you a call.