Predicting soldier retention from army spouse characteristics and attitudes: Soldiering on with spouse support

The U.S. Army has a vested interest in retaining the skilled personnel necessary to achieve its mission and strategic goals. A wealth of research has investigated the retention process and what influences service member decisions to stay in the military. While families are an important influence on soldier retention decisions, research on the mechanism by which this happens is lacking. This report explores the relationship between spouse attitudes and perceptions, resource use, and soldier retention almost two years later, using a proposed theoretical model. Our results generally support our model, with the important change that resource use and unmet needs and stress were not directly associated with specific attitudes toward staying in the military as we had expected. Instead, the association was accounted for by relationship with general attitudes toward the military. Spouses whose needs were unmet after seeking help from available resources experienced greater stress, and spouse unmet needs and reports of greater stress were associated with worse general attitudes toward the military; worse general attitudes toward the military were associated with less inclination to stay a military family; which in turn predicted soldier turnover almost two years later. As the research in this report shows, providing benefits to military spouses is also associated with a tangible and important outcome for the military: improved service member retention.