"I'm Married to Someone in the Military": Who Identifies with the Military Spouse Role?

The military community is shifting. What once used to be a fairly homogenous community is developing more fractures due to three intersecting factors: the more traditional and conservative culture of the military, an increase in the diversity of military personnel and their families, and a loosening of society's traditional gender norms. These rifts among military families present an interesting opportunity to examine the salience of the military spouse role for those within the community, especially considering the U.S. military's heavy involvement in the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In this research I seek to answer who identifies with the military spouse role? What factors pull someone in one direction, where they identify more with the role, and what factors pull someone in the other direction, in which they identify, less with the role? Using the 2006 Survey of Active Duty Spouses, this research seeks to identify the influential factors that are associated with social patterns in the military spouse community of who identifies more or less with the military spouse role. Preliminary findings demonstrate that outside identifies, such as employment or higher educational attainment, have the strongest effect--one that is a negative association with the military spouse role. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]