Coping with Stress in Families of Servicemen: Searching for “Win-Win” Solutions to a Conflict between the Family and the Military Organization

The objective of this research was to explore the coping patterns of servicemen's families with the competing demands of two institutions: the military organization and the family. The sample comprised one hundred career soldiers along with their families. The research instruments included individual interviews, a battery of questionnaires, and a role-playing task. Examination of the couple's joint coping modes yielded two major categories of families — families that were successful in their efforts to resolve the military vs. family conflict, and families that did not manage to reconcile the competing demands of these two domains. Within each of these two categories there were a variety of distinct profiles. To compare the dynamics of successful coping with less successful coping regarding the military vs. family conflict, a conceptual model was suggested. This model subsumes the antecedent variables (job issues, support network, and couple relationships); mediating variables (cognitive appraisal of conflict severity and coping potential, as well as actual coping strategies); and outcome variables reflecting the degree of adjustment to the military vs. family conflict.