The Temporal Relationship Between Intrafamilial Violence, Deployment, and Serious Mental Illness in US Army Service Members

Prior research has established an association between deployment and family violence, with insufficient evidence to identify when such violence occurs in relation to deployment and identification of mental illness in ADSM. This project will use: 1) longitudinal models to capture the temporal relationships between deployment, mental illness and family violence and 2) qualitative techniques to allow military stakeholders to evaluate Stage 1 findings and inform future interventions. This year we assembled our experts, obtained human subjects approvals, and acquired datasets. We now have our finalized cohort for our study period of interest. Our programmer is working intensively to clean the datasets so that we can link deployment/UIC/MOS records to substantiated reports of family abuse and medical claims data. Once this is done, we will move forward with formal data analyses and begin to answer our research questions. The last 3 months have been filled with progress and momentum, and we look forward to sharing results from our analyses in the upcoming months.