Background: U.S. military personnel face challenging situations including frequent deployments, family separations, and exposure to war. Identifying coping strategies used by the most resilient service members and veterans could positively influence military resiliency training programs.
Objective: The purposes of this paper are to investigate the relationship between coping and resilience among U.S. military active service members and veterans, to identify the coping strategies used by those considered most resilient, and to discuss coping and resilience as they relate to the workplace.
Methods: U.S. military active service members and veterans (N = 191) completed a demographic survey and two self-report questionnaires: The 14-Item Resilience Scale [1] and the Brief COPE [2].
Results: Active duty service members had higher resilience scores than veterans (p < 0.05), but both fell into the moderate range. Coping strategies were not significantly different between the two groups (p > 0.05). Active service members' resilience was predicted by their use of positive reframing and less use of self-blame as coping strategies, accounting for 52.3% of the variance (R2 = 0.523, F(2, 60) = 32.92, p = 0.000). Veterans' resilience was predicted by longer time-in-service, greater use of humor, and less use of self-blame as coping strategies, explaining 44.8% of the variance (R2 = 0.448, F(3, 116) = 31.408, p = 0.000).
Conclusions: This research identifies the positive coping strategies, and least-used negative coping strategies, of the U.S. service members and veterans in our study population with higher resilience scores. Incorporating this information into military- or veteran-based resilience training is likely to increase training effectiveness.
Keywords: Positive reframing; humor; self-blame; time-in-service.