Jay Teachman Luck Tedrow Western Washington University
This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
The U.S. military is the single largest employer of young men in the United States, with about 10-12% of recent cohorts of young men serving a term in the military. Military recruitment is an often hotly debated topic of public policy centering on issues such as access, equality of representation by race, and transferability of training to the civilian labor market. In Congress, veterans' rights and benefits are significant budgetary items (70 billion dollars were spent on veterans programs in 2006), and veterans' organizations constitute powerful political action groups. In 2005, Americans spent nearly two trillion dollars on health care. The average American family spent nearly $2700 on health care, or about 6% of its total expenditures. Any institution that affects the health of a large number of Americans, such as the Armed Forces, thus merits intensive examination. In addition, the health of veterans holds consequences for the Veterans Administration. Although the majority of veterans (75%) never make use of health benefits available to them, the Veterans Administration still spends more than 30 billion dollars annually on health care. Understanding the link between military service and need for health care is therefore critically important for planning purposes.
Using longitudinal data from the 1979 National Longitudinal Study of Youth (NLSY), this research will extend the investigators? previous research on the consequences of military service by examining the relationship between military service and both physical and mental health of men. The study will extend beyond the existing literature by explicitly considering how military service during the All Volunteer Force (AVF) era is linked to health up to age 40. The investigators will pay particular attention to potential variations in the effect of military service as they occur according to race and characteristics of service. In addition, the research will make use of several ?natural experiments? made possible by the design of the NLSY to more accurately adjust for the nonrandom selection of individuals into military service.
Broader Impacts
The research will add to the existing literature on the impact of military service on health which should prove useful to groups and individuals responsible for administering programs directed at military personnel and veterans. The research will be conducted in the Department of Sociology at Western Washington University. The department does not have a graduate program but does have a long history of producing students who eventually enter a graduate program in sociology. Recognizing this link to higher education, the department has revised its curriculum to more fully involve undergraduates in the research enterprise. Thus, all students are now expected to complete a capstone seminar that involves a research project for which this grant will provide data and valuable training. In addition, the data generated by the grant will be used in statistics and research methods courses and in our optional computer applications course. Finally, the project will employ several undergraduates on the grant who will participate fully in all aspects of the research.
