Search

Support for U.S. military personnel appears high, but does it extend to veterans after service ends? This study evaluates public support for social engagement with veterans and spending on recent military veterans’ health care and estimates the extent of socially desirable reporting on these forms of support. It uses a list experiment to identify the extent of socially desirable reporting on topics. Findings demonstrate that the public offers overwhelming support for spending on veterans’ health care and social engagement with the group, but they somewhat overstate this support. Support differs by age, race, and political ideology, and social desirability bias varies by race, political ideology, and prior military experience. African Americans express the lowest levels of support for returning veterans and the greatest extent of socially desirable reporting on that support. This is despite generally high rates of service and greater labor market returns to that service among this demographic group. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To evaluate how the media frames veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, this study systematically assesses the discourse on Iraq and Afghanistan veterans in the New York Times and Washington Post from 2003 to 2011. Our analysis of a stratified sample of 151 articles featuring veterans from either the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan finds that the media frames veterans as damaged by their service but deserving of government benefits and social assistance. When the media frames veterans as actively engaging in society, their social engagement is often because of or despite their injuries or mistreatment. We find interplay between victimization and deservingness such that depictions of the cohort as physically and mentally damaged complement and justify arguments for a sustained high level of benefits to accommodate the needs of veterans. We thus argue that generous benefits for veterans partly stem from their depiction as having suffered from their service. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we investigate public attitudes toward combat veterans returning from Iraq. Using data from a nationally representative survey that incorporates an experimental design, we assess the extent to which attitudes toward military veterans and private contractors differ, and whether public attitudes toward men vary based on combat and war zone experience. Drawing on social psychology and military sociology, we test hypotheses derived from a conceptual model of stigma and from research on the cultural injunction to "support the troops." Consistent with the first portion of the stigma model, members of the public are not surprised to learn that men who went to a war zone behave according to stereotypes that imply that such men have problems with mental health, substance abuse, and violent behavior. Yet they do not discriminate against these men. Instead they favor men who went to Iraq compared to those who stayed in the United States. They also favor veterans compared to contractors. While combat veterans may be stereotyped, they are not stigmatized. They benefit from symbolic capital, which outweighs the effect of stereotypes on discrimination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]