A Look Inside Our Research Processes

At Operation Military Experience (Operation ME), we understand how the experiences of military families can impact the individual lives of family members. Our team understands the resilience of military families. We are committed to supporting that resiliency.

As researchers in the military-family space, we know that many military family members appreciate the opportunity to speak with us about their experiences. Participation in this study will contribute to a growing knowledge base regarding the long-term impact of deployment on military families, which could help improve services and policies for families who serve.

Family Selection

We have 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 the deployment of a parent when the children were very young.

Participant Requirements

If you agree to participate, we will ask your family to give us new data and grant us permission to access your historical data.

For the new data, both adolescents and each parent must complete an electronic survey and a telephone interview. This will happen twice: once immediately after selection (wave one) and again in about a year (wave two).

For the historical data, we will ask your permission to obtain administrative records about your family’s deployment history and use of services. By accessing these records, we may spend less time asking you detailed questions about events that happened a long time ago.

As always, participation is optional. Families can change their mind and withdraw from the study.

Participant Compensation

We compensate each family member for the time they spend talking with our interviewers or taking our surveys. Compensation ranges from $15 to $30 per family member for each time we gather new data, with greater compensation in wave two of data collection.

Use of Study Findings

We will distribute findings from this study throughout civilian and military communities using presentations, reports and journal articles. Additionally, we expect to use findings to enhance our own outreach efforts at MFRI, and we expect similar organizations and service providers to do the same. For example, the Nathanson Family Resilience Center, one of our study partners, operates Project FOCUS, one of the largest resiliency programs in the military assisting over 100,000 service members annually. The center has a long history of using findings from new research to enhance the effectiveness of their programming.