The Development and Validation of the Army Post-Deployment Reintegration Scale

Abstract

For military personnel, the post-deployment period can be associated with changes affecting their quality of life, the quality of their close relationships, and their attitudes concerning their military careers. There is, however, little published research concerning this process, and a major weakness of the previous work is the lack of an established measuring instrument. This article describes the development of the Army Post-deployment Reintegration Scale assessing the attitudes of military personnel in three key areas. Study 1 found support for a multidimensional model of post-deployment reintegration attitudes. Study 2 refined the dimensionality of the model to the positive and negative aspects of personal, family, and work reintegration and reduced the length of the scale to 36 items and provided preliminary evidence of its factorial validity and internal consistency reliabilities. Finally, in Study 3, the subscales were correlated in predicted ways with personal- and organizational-level outcomes (e.g., posttraumatic stress disorder [PTSD], organizational commitment).