by Chris Hilburn-Trenkle
One might say that Kenny Harris’ decision to join the military was preordained.
Harris’ grandfather was a veteran of the Korean War. His uncle served in the Vietnam War, and his father is an Army veteran. Harris recalls memories of playing basketball at a nearby gym with service members and attending church with active-duty personnel as a teenager.
Naturally, he became more interested in the military community, even before commissioning as a United States Army Officer himself. Harris deployed as a Scout Platoon Leader in support of Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan in 2013, and later served in South Korea and Poland. He saw first-hand the challenges faced by military members not just in combat situations, but while out in the field training in a non-deployed context.
Now a Ph.D. student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Social Work, Harris has focused his research on the mental health and psychological resilience among active-duty military personnel and their families. Harris, along with Dean Emeritus Gary Bowen and UNC School of Education’s Todd Jensen, recently published an article examining the relationship between the social and psychological domains of fitness and resiliency within the military setting, as well as the effects of formal and informal support among service members.
“I was most impressed with Kenny’s competency in generating a practice-based research question and using an appropriate data set and advanced statistics to test a working hypothesis from a thorough review of the literature,” said Bowen. “This article demonstrates an effective integration of theory, research, and practice with important implications for practitioners who work with active-duty military members. It was a pleasure working with Kenny as a co-author—he provided excellent leadership and persistence in completing the many tasks associated with publishing an article in a peer-review journal.”
The article, “Resiliency among United States Air Force personnel: The direct and interactive influence of cognitive fitness and confidence in social connections,” published in Military Psychology, marked a significant milestone for Harris as his first published peer-reviewed work.
“We are so pleased of Major Harris’ success in our doctoral program,” said Associate Dean for Doctoral Education Mimi Chapman. “His work to promote the resiliency and well-being of military service members is critical and something we should all care about.”
Collecting data for active-duty personnel can be challenging as a student, according to Harris.
Thanks to his relationship with Bowen, who is a member of Harris’ dissertation committee, Harris gained access to a data set of active-duty personnel from 2011 to 2014.
Bowen, a member of the original data collection team, and Jensen met regularly with Harris. The doctoral student knew that much of his research would focus on role performance, one’s ability to perform and successfully meet multiple role expectations.
From his experience as a social worker meeting one-on-one with service members, Harris was also interested in examining mental health among military personnel, as well as the social determinants of health.
Resilience as a concept can be defined in many different ways. It can be viewed as a trait, an outcome, or part of a recovery process. In the data set examined by Harris it was viewed in the context of successfully performing life’s roles.
“How do you perform in your personal roles, or responsibilities associated with your personal life,” Harris said. “We were also looking at how people performed with their job responsibilities. We were looking at work obligations.”
The three-person team found that junior enlisted service members reported the highest levels of resiliency compared to their peers. Conversely, junior officers — young leaders with at least a bachelor’s degree — were the active-duty members experiencing the most challenges in meeting both personal and professional expectations.
“As an officer myself, I was wondering, ‘What is that about?’” Harris said.
Harris and the scholars theorized that the findings were related to the job responsibilities of those surveyed. Junior service members often don’t have the same level of expectations as that of officers and seeing that perspective resonated with Harris.
“We have to do a better job, in my opinion, of targeting junior officers who might be having challenges that we may not know about because they’re not open about it because they’re in leadership roles,” he said.
Other findings highlighted the importance of social support resources for active-duty personnel. There are multiple formal support systems for military members, such as an individual’s unit chain of command and community resources, but the data indicated that these resources were underutilized. Similarly, strong informal social support, including family, friends and peers, was associated with improved levels of resiliency (or role performance) for service members in a way that formal support systems were not.
“These formal systems are great, but at the end of the day if we’re trying to reach the most people to have an influence on them and help them experience well-being and perform their roles effectively, it’s important to target these informal social support type resources,” Harris said.
Harris believes that the information contained in the data set will help him in future work. He is studying social stratification within the military and examining factors including racialized identity and the differences between officers and enlisted members. The challenges unique to service members of different ranks and gender seen from this data will help him conduct that research and find solutions for service personnel.
“As social workers, we want to help people who are experiencing different challenges and give voice to their experiences so we can come up with programs and initiatives that help those folks,” Harris said.
“This is opening the door to that.”
The views expressed here are solely those of the author and interviewee and do not reflect the official position or opinions of the United States Army or Department of Defense.
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