Rand: Long tours make divorce less likely
By Karen Jowers - Staff writer
Posted : Monday Apr 23, 2007 15:53:46 EDT

The longer you’re deployed, the less likely it is that your marriage will break up, according to a study released April 12 by the Rand Corp. think tank.

The only exceptions seem to be active-duty officers and enlisted members in the Air Force; the more days they’re deployed, the more likely it is their marriages will break up, Rand found.

But overall, the military divorce rate — about 3 percent — is about the same as it was in 1996, a time of peace with far less stress and far fewer demands on U.S. military families.

Rand conducted two analyses of military personnel records for its study. Researchers analyzed records of about 600,000 military personnel to determine the likelihood of marital breakups — divorce, separation or annulment — after deployments, said Benjamin Karney, a behavioral scientist at Rand and lead researcher on the report, “Families Under Stress: An Assessment of Data, Theory, and Research on Marriage and Divorce in the Military.”
Read the full report


“We didn’t see the negative effects of deployment on marriage that many people expect,” Karney said. “We saw that the more you’re deployed, the less likely you are to get divorced when you get back, compared to someone else who did not deploy or was deployed less time but was married for the same amount of time.

“The story is a story of resiliency,” he said.

“These numbers take nothing away from the huge burden on these families. But we know that stress and demands cause marital breakups in the civilian community. This suggests there’s something about military families that helps them be resilient in ways civilian families can’t be.”

But Karney acknowledged that more research is needed to further examine the long-term effects of battlefield deployments on military families.

“There is a limit to what service records can tell us,” he said.

In a separate analysis of personnel records of about 6 million service members between fiscal 1996 and fiscal 2005, the researchers found that the numbers do not show a dramatic increase in the number of military marriage breakups since the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq began, despite the increased stress on military families.

Rand also analyzed marriage rates, and found they followed a pattern similar to divorce rates, gradually rising through 2005.

Overall, military marriage breakups have increased gradually since 2001, to a rate of about 3 percent of marriages ending in divorce in 2005. That is about the same rate as in 1996.

In the Navy, the number of marriage breakups increased sharply in the two years after 2001, but have declined in the past two years, researchers said.
Twice as likely to split

Across the services, Rand said, the data show that the marriages of female service members tend to be shakier than those of male service members. Researchers said that in every branch of service, female service members are more than twice as likely to end their marriages as their uniformed male peers.

Female service members’ marriages don’t weather deployments as well, either.

Rand said more research needs to be done on ways to improve programs to support marriages of female service members.

Enlisted members are more likely to end their marriages than officers, researchers found, most likely due to the fact that officers tend to be older, and older couples generally are less likely to divorce.

The researchers noted that in surveys and studies, military spouses strongly endorse the view that the demands of military service, particularly deployments, lead to divorce. But Rand’s analysis does not support that, researchers said.

In fiscal 2005, about 3.4 percent of married enlisted active-duty service members and about 1.8 percent of married active-duty officers dissolved their marriages.

Reserve component members saw a spike in breakups after the divorce rate for that demographic dropped below 2 percent in fiscal 2000. It then proceeded to rise sharply through 2002, when it topped 5 percent. A drop in the rates followed, and reservists did not see the same spike in breakups that active Army officers did in 2004, which was widely reported in 2005.

Researchers still can’t definitively explain that 2004 spike in divorces among Army officers, especially in light of the fact that the rate for that group returned to 2003 levels in 2005. Researchers said the elevated 2004 rate could have been an anomaly and possibly the result of errors.

One theory is that if active-duty Army officers were under a great deal of stress in 2002 and 2003, the most vulnerable marriages could have been at risk in 2004.

“Once those marriages ended, only the most resilient marriages would remain, possibly accounting for the return to normal rates of marital dissolution” by 2005,” the Rand report stated.

A spike in the overall active-duty divorce rate occurred in 1999, and also has not been explained, Karney said.

In looking at the relationship between deployments and divorce, the researchers analyzed the records of all service members — active duty, Guard and reserve — who had married since October 2001, when the Afghanistan war began. They matched those records with a separate file with deployment histories for all service members deployed since October 2001.

He said researchers did not include people married before 2001 because those marriages also may have been affected by previous deployments.

This allowed them to compare the risk of marriage breakups for those who had been married for the same amount of time, but deployed for different lengths of time. “This restricts it to the youngest and most recently married, also known to be the most vulnerable,” he said. Ë

Ellie