Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

"The Best Years Of Our Lives”: Military Service And Family Relationships – A Life Course Perspective, Daniel Burland, Jennifer H. Lundquist

Dr. Jennifer H. Lundquist

All lives of military personnel and veterans are linked to other lives, but as Burland and Lundquist’s Chapter 8 (in this volume) indicates, this social reality is shown primarily by studies of military families within the relatively short period of the soldiers’ military service. The active-duty service member’s enlistment, departure for basic training, and deployment overseas, when that occurs, are documented by military records, and perhaps by fi eld surveys. By contrast, longitudinal studies of veterans, frequently over many years, have tended to focus on the individual veteran to the exclusion of significant others, family members, and friends. This limitation …