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Study Finds Most Married Military Couples Are Satisfied

A study at Kansas State University has found that the majority of married people at an Army post were satisfied with their relationship, despite challenges faced like deployments.

"Because of the stressors that have been on the military and military families, particularly in the last decade, it's easy to focus on the difficulty and dysfunction of their marriages," says Jared Anderson, PhD, an assistant professor of family studies and human services at Kansas State. "But I think one of the things that this study does is look at what makes these families resilient in the midst of ongoing stress."

Kansas State researchers in family studies and human services studied the marital quality of military couples and identified factors that relate to relationship distress. Their findings showed that the vast majority of people in the sample were nondistressed in their relationship.

The study used data collected in spring 2008 and included a sample of 700 U.S. Army soldiers and 390 spouses of soldiers at Fort Riley. Participants completed a survey that included demographic and quality of life questions, including measures for marital satisfaction.

After analyzing the data, the researchers found that the majority of the participants fell in the non-distressed range of their marital satisfaction. The findings showed that 81% of soldiers and 85% of spouses were categorized as relationally nondistressed.

The researchers also looked at factors that differentiated the participants categorized as distressed and nondistressed in their relationship. Overall, soldiers were 1.7 times more likely to be relationally distressed than the spouses of soldiers in the sample. While no factors were associated with distress or nondistress for the partners of spouses of soldiers, there were several variables linked to relational distress for soldiers.

A greater likelihood of being relationally distressed was associated with soldiers whose families did not accompany them to their current duty station and soldiers with newer marriages or who were dating or engaged vs. being married and who were lower in rank.

The study also looked for an association between the number of deployments and relational distress. Almost all of the soldiers in the study sample had been deployed at least once, and one third of the soldiers had been deployed two or more times.

"Deployment didn't factor into distress," Anderson says. "It's interesting, but within context it makes sense."

He said one reason for the finding is that literature shows that deployment is not the variable that affects being distressed or nondistressed, but instead combat exposure is the key factor.

— Source: Kansas State University