Military life, especially deployment, introduces stressors that extend beyond the individual service member, often influencing partners and family members. The spillover-crossover model suggests that work-related stressors can spill over to affect individual well-being and cross over to intimate partners, shaping couple dynamics. However, findings on the relationship between deployment and relationship satisfaction are mixed, perhaps in part because of different ways of measuring deployment history. Using dyadic survey data from 285 U.S.-based military couples with an active-duty service member and their civilian spouse, three separate path models were tested to assess the association between deployment and marital satisfaction with three different operationalizations of deployment history. Associations with other military characteristics, including the number of permanent change of station moves, years of service, and branch were also investigated in these models. Service members who reported at least one combat deployment reported higher marital satisfaction than those who had experienced only non-combat deployments. However, when service members were injured during a combat deployment mission, their spouses reported lower marital satisfaction. Surprisingly, of the other military characteristics examined, more PCS moves were consistently related to greater marital satisfaction. Overall, the results indicated that these military families were largely resilient and successful at navigating the relationship challenges of military life, suggesting a strength-based approach for efforts with military couples. Practical implications are also considered, particularly for families with an injured service member. Limitations and future directions for research are also shared.
In a world where the military acts as an extension of governments and society, precision and efficiency in military task execution are paramount. Across diverse operational contexts, military personnel are tasked with delivering consistently reliable outcomes, yet the nature of "reliability" - and the factors that enable it - remain unclear. This review synthesizes findings from empirical studies related to High-Reliability Organizations (HROs), military leadership, and social identity to better understand the nature of high reliability as exhibited by military personnel across various contexts. More specifically, it aims to identify and categorize implicit conceptualizations of high reliability within existing research literature, and to examine its antecedents. Following Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyzes 2020 (PRISMA; 2021) guidelines, we systematically reviewed peer-reviewed articles published between 1975 and 2025. Forty-five studies met the inclusion criteria and were retained for synthesis following quality assessment. Analysis suggests that the five principles of High-Reliability Followership provide a useful organizing framework for understanding high-reliability behavior in military contexts. Moreover, these behaviors appear to be shaped by a range of antecedents - many of which are linked to identity leadership and the development of a strong shared social identity within military teams.
Guided by family systems theory, this longitudinal study examined whether parental posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms, interparental conflict, and children's adjustment are linked in National Guard families. Participants were 159 families from a larger study of one state's National Guard. We examined whether parents' PTSD symptoms reported following return from deployment, and patterns of interparental conflict during the succeeding 12 months were related to children's internalizing and externalizing behaviors at the end of the year. Mixed-effects models estimated intercepts and slopes of interparental conflict, which were incorporated into structural equation models predicting child outcomes while controlling for baseline child behavior and control variables. Service members' PTSD symptoms predicted higher initial levels and increases in self-reported interparental conflict, whereas significant others' PTSD symptoms predicted higher initial levels only. Greater increases in significant others' interparental conflict predicted higher child externalizing behaviors at Time 3 after accounting for baseline externalizing behaviors. Together, these findings provide partial support for a family systems perspective linking parental distress, interparental functioning, and child adjustment. This study underscores the importance of examining trajectories of couple conflict during reintegration and suggests that programming to target interparental conflict in National Guard families may mitigate risk for children's externalizing problems.
