Spouses and family members from the 606th Air Control Squadron listen to a brief during a spouse day in 2019 at Aviano Air Base, Italy. The Defense Department has launched its latest biennial survey to assess the impact of military life on spouses and their families. (Heidi Goodsell/U.S. Air Force)
The Defense Department is asking more questions about finances and remote work in its latest spouse survey, which follows earlier data that indicated declining satisfaction with the transient military way of life.
The biennial poll includes questions about spouse employment, child care and well-being in the hope that the information collected can be used to tackle some of the challenges affecting military families, a DOD statement said Wednesday.
Family and policy programs will be adjusted in accordance with the results to prioritize the most pressing needs of the nearly 600,000 active-duty spouses and their families across all branches of the armed forces, the DOD said.
“We can hear directly from them about what is and isn’t working,” Patricia Montes Barron, deputy assistant secretary of defense for military community and family policy, said in the statement.
Marine Corps spouses attend a spouse's roundtable at Camp Lejeune, N.C., in October 2023. The Defense Department has launched its latest biennial survey to assess the impact of military life on spouses and their families. (Jacquilyn Davis/U.S. Marine Corps)
Issues such as spouse unemployment, access to affordable child care and financial pressures have persistently surfaced in DOD polling.
Overall, spouses’ satisfaction with military life has steadily declined since the survey was launched in 2012.
In the last poll, conducted between July and November 2021 and released in February 2023, 49% of respondents said they were satisfied with their lives in the military. That was down from 56% in 2019.
Military spouse unemployment was at 21%, according to the most recent findings, which is six times the average of the U.S. general population. It’s been at that level or higher since 2015.
A quarter of respondents also reported experiencing low or very low food security.
The survey, conducted by the Pentagon’s Office of People Analytics in collaboration with its Military Community and Family Policy office, uses probability-based sampling and weighting to ensure the results are generalizable to the population of military spouses, the statement said.
It takes an average of 20 minutes to complete.
The survey will be available for about eight weeks, the statement said. It can be found at www.dodsurveys.mil.
