全球智库信息集成服务系统

Defining Family Resilience

• Definitions of family resilience vary across the services; there is no officially recognized DoD-wide definition.
• As of early 2015, DoD had 26 policies related to family resilience.
• To facilitate a comprehensive view of family resilience programming across DoD, a well-defined, well-articulated definition of a family-resilience program is necessary.

Models of Family Resilience

• The three most prominent models of family resilience are (1) the resiliency model of family stress, adjustment, and adaptation, (2) the systems theory of family resilience, and (3) the family adjustment and adaptation response (FAAR) model.
• The most common family resilience factors — that is, the resources that families use to cope with stress — can be grouped into five domains: family belief system, family organization patterns, family support system, family communication/problem sharing, and the physical and psychological health of individual family members.

Military life presents a variety of challenges to military families, including frequent separations and relocations as well as the risks that service members face during deployment; however, many families successfully navigate these challenges. Despite a recent emphasis on family resilience, the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) does not have a standard and universally accepted definition of family resilience. A standard definition is a necessary for DoD to more effectively assess its efforts to sustain and improve family resilience. RAND authors reviewed the literature on family resilience and, in this report, recommend a definition that could be used DoD-wide. The authors also reviewed DoD policies related to family resilience, reviewed models that describe family resilience and identified key family resilience factors, and developed several recommendations for how family-resilience programs and policies could be managed across DoD.

• Skip to page content

Objective Analysis. Effective Solutions.