Since 2002, the not-for-profit Wounded Warrior Project (WWP) has sought to offer support for and raise public awareness of those injured during service on or after September 11, 2001. To this end, WWP gives members, or “alumni,” access to programs that nurture mind and body, as well as facilitate economic well-being.

Central to WWP’s success are its assessment efforts. In 2009, RAND researchers helped WWP design a web-based survey that would help the organization evaluate how well it is meeting its three primary strategic goals:

Ensure that wounded warriors are well-adjusted in mind and spirit.

Ensure that wounded warriors are...

This document describes analysis performed by the RAND Corporation for the Wounded Warrior Project (WWP). WWP is a not-for-profit organization whose mission is to honor and empower wounded warriors by raising awareness about the needs of injured service members, helping them assist one another, and providing programs that nurture the mind and body and encourage economic empowerment and engagement.

WWP is engaged in a longitudinal data-collection effort involving five waves of a survey aimed at understanding the deployment experiences, employment status, financial circumstances, physical and emotional health, and health care needs of its alumni.¹ The survey instrument was developed by...

WWP maintains a database of alumni who self-register for participation in the project. At the time of registration, each individual provides information on his or her branch of service, current service status, rank, type of discharge, dates of service, and injuries incurred.

Both the 2010 and 2011 surveys were web-based and administered to all alumni in the WWP database. Westat fielded the 2010 survey between February 5 and March 22, 2010, a time span of six weeks, and the 2011 survey took place over seven weeks between March 29 and May 17, 2011. Most of the communication between Westat and...

Before detailing the results of the strategic objectives, we describe the demographic and service characteristics of the respondents. Table 3.1 shows the details for four files: the 2010 and 2011 full sets of responses and the 2010 and 2011 data for the cohort of 499 repeat respondents. Sixty to 65 percent of the respondents were married, 15 to 22 percent had never been married, and roughly 14 percent were divorced, with the few remaining widowed, separated, or unknown. The vast majority (approximately 90 percent) of all respondents were male.

With regard to educational attainment, 20 percent of respondents had a...

This report takes an in-depth approach to the issues of mental health and resiliency, employment and financial outcomes, and physical health among WWP alumni. Specifically, we focus on a subset of survey questions highlighted by WWP as important goals that the organization has set for future waves of the data-collection effort. For each question, we consider the possibility that certain subsets of the alumnus population, as defined by marital status, gender, pay grade, and employment status, may experience different outcomes. In addition, where WWP has focused on a very specific response option, we broaden the definition to consider whether individuals...