Understanding military spouses’ permanent change of station move experiences

Abstract: Military OneSource (2021) defines a permanent change of station (PCS) move as a U.S. service member (SM) being assigned to a new work or duty location. Despite the name, PCS moves are not permanent. The duration for most SMs, from all US military branches, PCS moves were between two to four years. However, about 33% of all U.S. SMs experience a yearly PCS move (Tong et al., 2018). This shows the prevalence of PCS moves in all SMs’ careers which can lead to many potential family life disruptions especially to their military spouses. Unfortunately, literature on PCS moves impact to military spouses or spouses married to SMs from different US branches, remains sparse in a qualitative analysis study. This study, through conventional content analysis, provided an in-depth qualitative examination of military spouses’ coping experiences with PCS moves. This study identified three common themes from all 12 participants’ PCS move experiences. These themes are PCS move negative impacts on self and family like postpartum depression, anxiety, stress on family raising, and constant uncertainty, adapting to military culture support role in culture of SM and their career first, and different coping styles with PCS moves like social isolation, build up support system, utilizing formal and informal resources. This study’s overall findings are consistent with the available literature’s conclusions about the negative impacts of PCS moves on military spouses. These impacts include overall lower well-being, lower satisfaction and difficult adjustment to military and surrounding base culture, health issues, career struggles, social isolation, family lifestyle, childraising issues, and receiving medical care services (Lutz, 2014; Runge et al., 2014; Tong et al., 2018; Office of People Analytics, 2020; Keilholz, 2020; Gleason and Beck, 2017; Mailey et al., 2018; Curran et al., 2018). Like other similar studies, half of this dissertation’s participants also reported the benefits for themselves and their families. These benefits include building resilience, having an open mindset to challenges, meeting people from diverse cultures, and traveling around the world (Borah & Fina, 2017; Huffman et al., 2019).

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