Comparatively speaking, the United States Air Force has suffered few casualties over more than a decade of war (Fischer, 2010). However, many airmen were injured in hostile or combat-related incidents. The Air Force wanted to understand the well-being of its members, current and former, who have sustained combat injuries. It wanted to get a sense of their quality of life and the challenges that impede their reintegration into society over the long term. The Air Force turned to RAND’s Project AIR FORCE for help in assessing these areas of concern and requested an analysis that would provide a foundation for...

In assessing individuals with reintegration challenges potentially exacerbated by their injuries, several life domains warrant consideration. A holistic perspective suggests that the nature of the injury itself is important and that social and work functioning as well as other stressors, such as housing instability, should be included (see, e. g., Berglass and Harrell, 2012; IOM, 2010). The purpose of the current project was to lay a foundation for a longitudinal effort. Thus, we surveyed the literature with the goal of determining what functional domains should be included in this holistic perspective. We then developed a notional model that guided our...

This chapter provides an overview of our survey procedure and content. The previous chapter includes a general discussion of relevant domains, and we provide more details on the specifics of measurement here. The chapter begins with a description of the survey participants. Second, it recounts how we administered the survey. The third section summarizes the measures we employed for the outcomes or areas of interest as suggested by our literature review and holistic approach to reintegration.

As the Air Force’s focus was on airmen injured in combat, we pursued airmen enrolled in one of the programs developed to assist them,...

This chapter provides an overview of the key findings from this analysis. Detailed findings, when not presented here, may be found in Appendix C. The chapter begins by describing those who participated in the survey. It then reports the survey results in the areas of interest: mental health and substance abuse, physical health and medical care, use of mental health services, interpersonal relationships, occupational functioning, financial stability, housing, and evaluation of the AFW2 and AFRCC programs. In general, we report statistics for single variables and provide both a point estimate and confidence intervals around that point estimate. Confidence intervals have...

Our study examined the status of airmen in the fall of 2011 and the support airmen received during that time. We examined well-being based on a number of indicators among a population identified by the Air Force as experiencing reintegration challenges severe enough to warrant consideration for medical retirement because of combat-related injuries and illnesses. Our investigation is somewhat unusual. On the one hand, we attempted to answer the Institute of Medicine’s (2010) call for a more sophisticated and holistic examination of reintegration, and hence include measures in domains including mental and physical health, mental health treatment and potential barriers,...