MILITARY DEPLOYED PARENT PERCEPTIONS OF INVOLVEMENT IN THE EDUCATION OF THEIR CHILDREN: A PHENOMENOLOGICAL STUDY
by
Liberty University
A Dissertation Presented in Partial Fulfillment
Of the Requirements for the Degree
Doctor of Education
Liberty University
2021
MILITARY DEPLOYED PARENT PERCEPTIONS OF INVOLVEMENT IN THE EDUCATION OF THEIR CHILDREN: A PHENOMENOLOGICAL STUDY
by Eder G. Bennett
A Dissertation Presented in Partial Fulfillment
Of the Requirements for the Degree
Doctor of Education
APPROVED BY:
ABSTRACT
The purpose of this qualitative transcendental phenomenological study was to explore the perceptions and lived experiences of deployed military parents regarding active involvement in their child’s education. For this purpose, this study developed an informed answer to the following research question: What are the perceptions of deployed militaryparents regarding active involvement in their child’s education? The study used the theory of Epstein regarding the triangle relationship between parents, teachers, and the community to help explore and make sense of the stories and experiences of parents who have or are currently experiencing challenges associated with military deployment. The study made use of questionnaires, semi-structured interviews, artifact analysis, and focus groups. The researcher conducted data analysis using open coding, phenomenological reduction, imaginative variation, and comparison. The setting for this study was Fort Rapture. The sample consisted of 10-12 personnel currently deployed or previously deployed within the past two years, who have pre-K-12 school-aged children that are currently in school.
Keywords: parental involvement, military deployment, deployed parents, soldiers as parents, phenomenology
Copyright Page
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No original material may be used without permission of the author
All rights reserved
Dedication
Though there are many to whom this work may be dedicated, the below list (to be added later) highlights some of those most responsible for me continuing to work through this project.
Acknowledgments
The below-listed people provided advice and support to aid in my learning process. Without them, this work would never have come to completion.
Table of Contents
ABSTRACT 3
Copyright Page 4
Dedication 5
Acknowledgments 6
Table of Contents 7
List of Tables 11
List of Figures 12
List of Abbreviations 13
CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION 14
Overview 14
Background 14
Historical 16
Theoretical 17
Social 18
Situation to Self 19
Problem Statement 20
Purpose Statement 21
Significance of Study 21
Theoretical Significance 22
Practical Significance 23
Empirical Significance 23
Research Questions 23
Central Research Question 24
Sub Research Question One 24
Sub Research Question Two 25
Sub Research Question Three 25
Definitions 26
Summary 27
CHAPTER TWO: LITERATURE REVIEW 29
Overview 29
Theoretical Framework 30
Related Literature 31
Impact of Military Deployment 31
The Supportive Role of Community 37
Resiliency 41
How Technology Plays a Part 47
The Role of the Teacher 50
Summary 56
CHAPTER THREE: METHODS 60
Overview 60
Design 60
Research Questions 63
Setting 63
Participants 64
Procedures 65
The Researcher’s Role 66
Data Collection 67
Questionnaire 67
Interviews 69
Artifact Analysis 72
Focus Group 73
Data Analysis 74
Horizonalizing 76
Imagination Variation 77
Essence 77
Trustworthiness 77
Credibility 78
Dependability and Confirmability 78
Transferability 78
Ethical Considerations 79
Summary 79
CHAPTER FOUR: FINDINGS 81
Overview 81
Participants 81
Results 82
Summary 82
CHAPTER FIVE: CONCLUSION 83
Overview 83
Summary of Findings 83
Discussion 83
Implications 84
Delimitations and Limitations 84
Recommendations for Future Research 84
Summary 85
REFERENCES 86
APPENDIX A: LIBERTY UNIVERSITY IRB APPROVAL 99
APPENDIX B: RECRUITMENT FLYER 100
APPENDIX C: INFORMED CONSENT 101
APPENDIX D: RECRUITMENT LETTER 104
APPENDIX E: QUESTIONNAIRE 105
APPENDIX F: INTERVIEW GUIDE 106
APPENDIX G: FOCUS GROUP QUESTION GUIDE 108
List of Tables
Note: Anticipated Tables
Table 1.Questionnaire…………………………..…………..….…………….……………..…65
Table 2.Participants Item Selection. ……………….…………………………….……….…...65
Table 3. Standardized Open-Ended Interview Questions…………………………………..…..68
Tab 4. Standardized Open-Ended Focus Group Questions…………………………………......68
List of Figures
Figure 1. Theoretical Frameworks, Methods, and Procedures………………….………………70
Figure 2. XXXXXXX…………………………………………………………………………..XX
Figure 3. XXXXXXX…………………………………………………………………………..XX
List of Abbreviations
Positive emotion, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning and Accomplishment (PERMA)
REsilience and Activity for every DaY (READY)
Master Resiliency Training (MRT)
Stress Management and Resilience Training (SMART)
CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION
Overview
The purpose of this qualitative transcendental phenomenological study was to explore the perceptions and lived experinces of deployed military parents regarding active involvement in their child’s education. The study aimed to provide a foundation of understanding for educational stakeholders and the military community in order to fill the void in a child’s educative experience created by a deployed parent. This chapter provides a framework for the research; discusses why the problem necessitated research; provides an overview of previous research; identifies the importance of this research for stakeholders in education, including military personnel, families, teachers, and community members; and introduces the research questions.
Background
Deployment involves temporary relocation of a military unit within the United States or in overseas locations (Alfano, Lau, Balderas, Bunnell, &Beidel, 2016). Deployment has three phases; pre-deployment, deployment, and post-deployment. Though all three phases are challenging for military personnel and their families, the deployment and post-deployment phase is believed to be the most severe (Alfano et al., 2016). As the military parent prepares to leave, the children are emotionally affected (Alfano et al., 2016). It is important to note that the specific responses to deployment depend on various factors such as age, gender, maturity, pre-existing parent-child relationship, and the coping strategies and skills provided through interventions.
Children of military parents undergo tremendous challenges, especially during their parent’s deployment. These challenges are mainly psychological strain, which often manifests in poor academic performance (Nicosia, Wong, Shier, Massachi, & Datar, A., 2017). Due to actions taken by the United States military in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, extended deployment has become a reality for children of military parents. The standard deployment time for the Army is 12 months, but this could extend to 18 months. During this time, research findings have shown that the academic performance of military children decreases in a noticeable way (Bello?Utu & DeSocio, 2015; Nicosia et al., 2017). The academic performance of children of military parents on long-term deployment, which can be as much as 18 months or even more, are lower than children without deployed parents (Moeller, Culler, Hamilton, Aronson, & Perkins, 2015).
Deployment and the period after deployment have been shown to affect the learning and academic performance of children because it creates instability in the lives of a student and their environment (Conforte, Bakalar, Shank, Quinlan& Stephens, 2017). Children of deployed military parents become stressed students due to the absence of their parents and the shock and pressure of adjusting to the new normal. The stress associated with an absent parent has been shown to cause problems in concentrating, learning new academic concepts, and in controlling their emotions and expressions (Conforte et al., 2017). The exact manner in which such stress manifests depends on the individual child. Still, some common responses include becoming quiet and withdrawn or, conversely, hyperactive, disruptive to classroom etiquette, and lack of ability to concentrate on a single activity.
There is a growing body of research on possible interventions that can be provided through policy, community, and institutions such as schools (Epstein, 2011; Epstein et al., 2018). However, it has been noted that there is not much research on the views of military parents in this context, especially their requirement to leave their children to serve the country. Like any reasonable and non-military parent, they want to be involved in the education of their children. This study, therefore, seeks to research and highlight the perceptions of military parent’s involvement in their children’s education. To this end, the historical, social, and theoretical contexts in which this problem exists are discussed further below.
Historical
The problem of the effects of deployment on children\\\\\\\'s education is one that researchers have only recently begun to examine. Alfano, Lau, Balderas, Bunnell, and Beidel (2016) showed that the impact of a parent’s deployment could harm children’s education. According to DePedro, Astor, Gilreath, Benbenishty, and Berkowitz (2018), there is sufficient evidence to indicate a need for schools to accept and address the challenges faced by children of a deployed parent in order to reduce the likelihood of them veering off the academic path. Over time, the problem of deployed parents and the ramifications of their deployment on their children\\\\\\\'s education has become more transparent, which is why this recent research has emerged. The United States government has gone so far as to put together a booklet to assist parents facing deployment and to explain to them some of the challenges that their families and children might face.
Per the Educator\\\\\\\'s Guide to the Military Child During Deployment (U.S. Department of Defense, 2008.), the stressful effects of deployment impacts not only the family members but also the service member. Once a military parent deploys, regardless of the period of the deployment, the family members thatremain behind have to readjust and redistribute their roles to compensate for the absence of the deployed family member. The research to date indicates that for young families, there is an increased tendency to return to the location of their origin to reduce costs and as a measure to add to psychological support sources needed for the family to keep going (U.S. Department of Defense, n.d.).
Moreover, researchers at the RAND Corporation have shown that children of deployed parents face academic challenges because of the disruption of their home life structure (RAND Corporation, 2012). Some of the critical points identified by the RAND Corporation are that children whose parents are deployed for more than a year tend to achieve statistically different academic results when compared to the scores of students who have never experienced a parental deployment (RAND Corporation, 2012).
Theoretical
The theoretical underpinnings of this research problem involve the relationship between parental involvement and academic achievement, which has been well documented (Trautman & Ho, 2018). Epstein’s parent-teacher-community theory emphasizes the parent-child role. Hirschi’s social bond theory, as well as Sampson and Laub’s life course theory, both support the idea that strong families and support systems lead to outcomes that are more positive as children progress into adulthood. Therefore, it is reasonable to posit that the extended absence of a parent combined with the stress that is associated with military deployments on children has a profoundly adverse effect on young learners’ academic achievement. Moreover, concern over this adverse effect can have a corresponding negative impact on deployed parents’ morale and well-being, perhaps even to the extent that their job performance is affected. Although military service is inherently a dangerous enterprise, causing service members to be concerned for their safety, parents serving in combat may also experience stress over concerns for their families back at home. The extent to which service members are negatively affected by these concerns may impact their ability to achieve their mission.
Social
One of the more significant findings of the RAND Corporation\\\\\\\'s (2012) study into the negative ramifications of deployment on children\\\\\\\'s academic progress is that parents tend to suffer most from the deployment, which adds a burden to the child\\\\\\\'s mind and can distract from school or add to the child\\\\\\\'s worries and anxieties. Thus, a holistic approach to this problem needs to be developed to provide deployed parents, their spouses or intimate partners, their children, and other members and friends the knowledge and resources required to address every facet of the issue. One way to develop this holistic approach is to obtain a better understanding from parents about what they go through and what their experiences are. Because so much of their experience translates to the child\\\\\\\'s experience, it is most helpful to gain this understanding first. As Castro et al. (2015) pointed out, a parent plays a pivotal role in the child’s academic development. If the parent is not actively involved due to being deployed or because their spouse is deployed, the child may receive less support and engagement from the parent than under normal circumstances.
The social aspect of this problem extends beyond the family. Teachers have to find ways to cope with the child\\\\\\\'s home challenges and the community, as the child\\\\\\\'s potential to develop could impair the community\\\\\\\'s future (Benner, Boyle, & Sadler, 2016). As noted by O\\\\\\\'Neal, Mallette, and Mancini (2018), community connections are essential for military parents who are looking out for the well-being of their children. Children are part of families, who are, in turn, part of wider communities, and those communities provide support for families, and in turn, that support extends to the child. A clear and definite social relationship has to be explored in this issue to see whether deployed parents are utilizing the support of their communities to help their children develop adequately.
Situation to Self
I am a United States Army officer and an Instructor with the United States Army Recruiting and Retention College. I have more than thirteen years of military service, which spans across a range of positions and assignments. I consider myself a member of the population that I am studying because I am familiar with their issues and experiences, and that is the precise reason I have chosen to conduct this research. I believe that by better allowing the deployed parent\\\\\\\'s perspective to be understood, better solutions can be devise. My assumption is that the nature of the lived experiences of deployed parents is characterized by an overarching perception that their deployment, military occupation, and geographic distance from their family members represent the main obstacles in assisting in their child\\\\\\\'s educative process.This assumption is based on an ontological view. According to Creswell (2013), researchers embracing ontological views believe that phenomena hold multiple realities. These realities require multiple forms of evidence and can be discovered through investigation. I also believe that the knowledge one learns can be communicated effectively to others and that this reality, as understood by the individual, can be reported to others regardless of the subjective values and biases that the researcher might possess.
The research paradigm by which I view this study is constructivism; this paradigm suggests that learning is an active, constructive process wherein the learner constructs the information or creates his subjective representations of objective reality (Amineh & Asl, 2015). I expect that participants in this study have been as honest as possible and that the meaning they constructed for themselves can be useful in creating better approaches to helping their children academically.
This research paradigm comes with limits. The memory of individuals may differ from the facts, which could lead to a participant\\\\\\\'s recollections and meaning construction seeming to be unreliable (Gardner, 2001). However, even if the memories shift, the creation of meaning that the participants provide is essential because this feeling and sense of things are what has stayed with them.
Problem Statement
It is important to note thatthe deployment of military parents can disrupt the educational and academic progress of their children. As pointed out by De Pedro et al. (2018), children who go a considerable period (a year or more) without a parent in their lives because of deployment are at higher risk of suffering academically. Currently, there are no clear guidelines available for parents or teachers to help in the development process of children of deployed military parents. The United States government has provided the Educator’s Guide to the Military Child During Deployment (U.S. Department of Defense, n.d.). Still, it is brief and mainly designed to alert parents about what to expect and does not give a great deal of in-depth information about possible interventions.
The problem is there are no clearly defined protocols or persuasive strategies that deployed parents could employ to assist in their efforts to be involved in the education of their children (De Pedro et al., 2018). This gap, however, represents an opportunity for new research. To date, there has been some research concerning the effects of deployment and the possible corrective measures. Still, this research has focused only on children, school, and society without regard to parental perspectives (Bello?Utu & DeSocio, 2015; De Pedro et al., 2018).With the understanding that deployment affects military service members as well as their children and family members, it is therefore essential to focus on parental perspectives.
That is why the theoretical approach provided by Epstein et al. (2018) can help to use primary stakeholders—parents, teachers, and community—to come to the aid of children who have a deployed parent. What is necessary at present is the development of efficacious interventions that directly address this problem (De Pedro et al., 2018). To develop such interventions, one must first understand the perspective of the parents because they are the ones who experience an immediate impact (RAND Corporation, 2012). I believe that this phenomenological research design has helped uncover this perspective and presented the information in a meaningful way that assists in the development of appropriate interventions using Epstein’s parent-teacher-community theory.
Purpose Statement
The purpose of this qualitative transcendental phenomenological study was to explore the perceptions and lived experinces of deployed military parents regarding active involvement in their children’s education. This study provides a foundation of understanding that can assist educational stakeholders and the military community in filling the void created by a deployed parent with the goal of helping the student of the deployed parent. At the outset of the research, the perceptions of military parents were defined as the experiences, attitudes, feelings, and beliefs about being absent from home, while their child attempts to go through the educative process and what they could do to help. The theory that guided this research was Epstein’s (2018) parent-teacher-community theory, which highlights the importance of the relationship between these three stakeholders in shaping the academic progress of the child.
Significance of Study
Though many Americans profess to support the troops, it is clear that the needs of many deployed military parents are being overlooked. Therefore, the significance of this study relates to filling this gap by identifying optimal strategies that would help deployed parents actively participate in their children’s education without creating detractions from their occupational performance. As noted by Cozza et al. (2018), more research into the relationship between military parents and their children is needed. Likewise, Alfano, Lau, Balderas, Bunnell, and Beidel (2016) have found that military deployment puts the academic progress of children of deployed parents at risk.
This study provided a foundation of understanding that can assist educational stakeholders and the military community in filling the void created by a deployed parent with the goal of helping the student of the deployed parent. Alfano et al. (2016) noted that there is still a need for researchers to examine, in detail, the relationship between and among the academic development of the child, the role of the deployed parent, and other contextual factors such as community, teacher role, and so forth. However, since the RAND Corporation’s (2012) examination of the effect of deployment on military children, there has not been a significant review of the data regarding parents\\\\\\\' perception of this challenging issue or contextual factors.
Theoretical Significance
This study helped to explore Epstein’s parent-teacher-community theory on academic success from the standpoint of military deployment and parent-absence. By showing how parent absence might impact the student’s academic achievement, this study could provide additional insight into the applications or limitations of Epstein’s theory. It may also help to reinforce Hirschi’s social bond theory and Sampson and Laub’s life course theory. Although these latter two deal primarily with deviance, the findings of this study could facilitate their application to academic challenges for students as well.
Practical Significance
This study aimed to build on the study by the RAND Corporation (2012) and incorporate the insights or more recent studies such as that conducted by De Pedro et al. (2018) to focus the phenomenological study and guide the interviews and focus groups that were used for obtaining the data on parents’ perceptions. It is believed that this study can help to improve the academic progress of children of deployed parents by giving stakeholders a better sense of challenges, options for overcoming these challenges, and real-life stories about what works, what does not work, and what might work. Hearing the experiences from the people involved can help to give a better sense of the reality of the situation. Therefore, this study provided an exploration and examination of these parents\\\\\\\' perceptions and the contextual factors that impact their lives and contributed to the development of a fuller understanding of how the military community can better assist parents, teachers, and the overall community itself.
Empirical Significance
This study aims to provide a foundation of understanding for educational stakeholders and the military community in order to fill the void in a child’s educative experience created by a deployed parent. By listening to military parents\\\\\\\' lived experiences, challenges, and success stories in coping with lengthy deployments, fresh and vital insights may be obtained that would otherwise go unidentified. These empirical observations and experiences can help inform efforts to develop the individualized interventions that are necessary to support deployed parents and their families in ways that draw on demonstrated successes and opportunities
Research Questions
This study used a transcendental phenomenological research design to explore the perceptions that military deployed parents have regarding their involvement in their children’s education. The theoretical framework that guided this study was the theory of parental involvement supplied by Epstein (2011) regarding the relationship between parents, school, and community. To address the central research question and sub-questions, this researcher collected and analyzed data from military parents who were (at the time) currently deployed or were deployed in the past two years (Creswell, 2013).
Central Research Question
What are the perceptions and lived experinces of deployed military parents regarding active involvement in their child’s education?
This question provided insight into the experiences of parents as they attempted to negotiate their deployment with their duties and responsibilities to their children. As Alfano et al. (2018) previously demonstrated, it was crucial to understand the broader contextual factors of this issue in order to arrive at an effective solution to the problem. Therefore, this question served as the primary focus.
Sub Research Question One
How do military parents describe their involvement in their children’s education while deployed?
This question was used to gain insight into the parents\\\\\\\' sense of whether they play a factor in their child\\\\\\\'s academic performance. If parents did not see themselves as a contributing factor in the child\\\\\\\'s academic progress, this could impact the way an intervention or solution would be affected. Parents play a vital role and are one of the leading players aside from teachers and the community in the establishment of the child\\\\\\\'s well-being and level of academic outcomes. Thus, it was essential to know what perception of their role a parent has.
Sub Research Question Two
How do military parents’ perceive the impact of their deployment on the familyand particularly on their child’s academic performance?
This question was important because it addressed the issue of whether parent absence is indeed a factor in a child’s academic performance. It also addressed the issue of whether deployment (absence by order rather than by personal choice) was viewed as problematic by the deployed parent. Some research has shown that absence engagement in the child’s academic performance depends upon the parent’s sense of what the child is going through (Castro et al., 2015). Thus, this research question helped to shed light on whether deployed parents see their absence in good, neutral or negative terms. If the parent was not in touch with what was going on in the child’s life, there was likely to be some greater need to focus on educating the parent about the need to be more engaged.
Sub Research Question Three
What challenges do military parents who are deployed face from their communities while trying to stay involved in their children’s education?
This question was crucial because even if deployed parents and their spouses possessed a desire to be involved in their child’s academic development, they may have encountered challenges within the community or school environment (Benner et al., 2016). Understanding what these challenges and conditions were can help in the formulation of recommended approaches that parents and stakeholders can utilize in the future. If the obstacles are not recognized, no adequate intervention can be implemented.
Definitions
For this study, the perceptions of military parents were defined as the experiences, attitudes, feelings, and beliefs about being absent from home while their child attempts to go through the educative process and what they could do to help.
1. Attitude: According to Project Implicit (2018), an attitude is “your evaluation of some concept (e.g., person, place, thing, or idea). An explicit attitude is the kind of attitude that you deliberately think about and report.” Attitude for this study refers to the evaluations made by military parents as well as their feelings and beliefs.
2. Deployment:The most precise use of this term is the movement of military personnel from home station to another location (usually outside continental U.S. and its territories) in support of a specific training exercise or combat operation. +(VA, 2020).
3. Educative process: This refers to any learning environment in which one can engage in a learning process (Glassman & Kang, 2016).
4. Environment: This refers to the three agencies by which a person’s behavior is shaped: one’s peers (family, friends, and community), organizations, and media (Bandura, 2018). This definition helps understand how the three stakeholders of Epstein\\\\\\\'s theory contribute to making up the environment of the learner.
5. Life course theory:This theory posits that one’s life course is determined by events in one’s early life, and if one is derailed through some traumatic event from a normal, supportive upbringing it can set one on a course for crime (Siegel, 2018).
6. Parental involvement: When parents participate and share communication with the school, parents gain active involvement in the educational process. Parental involvement may include parents volunteering in classroom activities and school events (Epstein, 2018).
7. Parent-teacher-community theory: This theory posits that a triumvirate of assistance among parents, teachers and community members to assist in the education of a child (Epstein, 2018).
8. Perception: This is the combination of experiences, attitudes, feelings, and beliefs of parents about being absent from home while their child attempts to go through the educative process and what they could do to help (Amineh &Asl, 2015; Benner et al., 2016).
9. Social bond theory: This theory posits people refrain from committing derelict acts or deviant behavior because they have strong social ties or bonds with others. When those bonds do not exist, people have no reason to refrain from negative, deviant or self-destructive behavior (Siegel, 2018).
Summary
This transcendental phenomenological study focused on exploring the perceptions of deployed military parents regarding active involvement in their child’s education. Currently, there are minimal guidelines available for parents or teachers to help in the development process of children of military deployed parents. This created a need to understand what parents go through during deployment in order to arrive at a better understanding of how stakeholders can more comprehensively address the issue of helping the children of deployed parents to achieve academic success during the stressful period of deployment. Thus, the purpose of this qualitative transcendental phenomenological study was to explore the perceptions and lived experinces of deployed military parents regarding active involvement in the education of their children. This study used the theory of Epstein (2018) regarding the triangle relationship between parents, teachers, and the community to help explore and make sense of the stories and experiences of parents who have dealt with this challenge in the past. By using interviews and focus group discussions, this study aimed to provide more insight into the issue of how to help the children of deployed parents.
CHAPTER TWO: LITERATURE REVIEW
Overview
This literature review provides an examination of the theoretical framework used in this research study as well as a review of the literature relevant to the overall topic. The theory of parental involvement developed by Epstein (2011) is used as the framework to contextualize this literature review. The theory focuses on the support-relationship that is ordinarily and inherent between parents and their children, and the support system available from schools and the entire community as it relates to the academic progression of students. It is especially important to consider this framework in the light of parents who are deployed to foreign wars or service and who are largely absent in their child\\\\\\\'s education. The parent makes up a significant part of the Epstein framework, so considering what happens when the parent is absent is necessary.
Parents\\\\\\\' perceptions of missing their children\\\\\\\'s lives and not being there as their children make educational decisions are also hard on parents, as the literature has shown. The focus of the literature review is on the experience of parents in supporting school children, the difficulties they face when deployed, and the ways that support can be provided from communities and schools while parents are absent. Very few researchers consider the perspective of parents, which creates the need to take a closer look at the phenomenon. This chapter discusses the impact that deployment has on children, types of community support available, the importance of resiliency training, the role of technology, and the role that teachers play, both in and outside of the classroom. The parent perception of these topics is provided when available, and the literature that is used provides insight into how these issues play a role in the academic lives of children of deployed parents. In the final analysis, the military family suffers from the deployment of parents. This is more so the case as far as the academic life of children is concerned.
Theoretical Framework
The theoretical framework for this study is the theory of parental involvement supplied by Epstein (2011) regarding the relationship between parents, school, and community. In accordance with the theory, parents play a pivotal role in providing the guidance and support children need to achieve their academic goals. The six types of involvement identified by Epstein (2011) are parenting, communicating, volunteering, learning at home, decision-making, and collaborating with the community. In all six types of involvement, the parent plays a pivotal role. The stronger the parent’s involvement—including setting high expectations for school achievement—the more likely the child is to pursue identified goals (Castro et al., 2015). This relationship between parental support and student academic achievement has been validated by numerous research studies and is recognized as a universal phenomenon in a variety of cultures (Benner, Boyle & Sadler, 2016; Mahuro & Hungi, 2016; Nunez et al., 2015).
The application of the theoretical framework to this study provided the contours for analysis. To determine the challenges, obstacles, benefits, and solutions to the question of how a military parent can support their child\\\\\\\'s education while deployed, this theoretical framework shows where to look and what supports should be in place. Epstein et al. (2018) compiled this information into a helpful theory that delineates the partnerships that schools, families, and communities can have to improve academic outcomes for young learners. Epstein et al. (2018) provided substantive evidence of the positive impact of parental and community involvement on academic achievement and performance in schools (Slavin, 2019). They concluded that this collaborative approach could also contribute to improved educator morale and enhanced reputations of schools in the community. By exploring how deployed parents perceive the effects of their absence on their child’s academic performance and whether those parents see any assistance coming from the community or school, a sense of what challenges remain for this population may be obtained.
Related Literature
Various studies (e.g., Alfano et al., 2016; MacDermid Wadsworth et al., 2017; Pexton, Farrants & Yule, 2018; Trautmann, Alhusen & Gross, 2015) have demonstrated that the education of children is affected by the military deployment of their parents. Further review of the literature indicates the relevance of consistency cannot be overstated when it comes to the proper management of the various adversities they encounter, particularly during the early stages of their development (DeVoe, 2017). Towards this end, it would be prudent to highlight not only the community\\\\\\\'s supportive role in this endeavor but also the role that other factors play such as technology and parental resiliency in addressing the diverse needs of learners from households where parents have been deployed.
Impact of Military Deployment
A study by Alfano, Lau, Balderas, Bunnell, and Beidel (2016) showed the negative impact of military deployment on children, particularly as it relates to their education. This could potentially create a need for these children to require mental health treatment because they lack the consistency and stability that most children have in a typical nuclear family. Furthermore, DePedro, Astor, Gilreath, Benbenishty, and Berkowitz (2018) point out; schools can play a significant role in alleviating some of the negative symptoms children experience when parents are deployed in the military. School climate is an essential factor in lessening the severity of mental health issues students face while one or more parents are deployed (DePedro et al., 2018). As Pexton, Farrants, and Yule (2018) observed, without support from schools, the family unit cannot come together cohesively, as one parent is away for a while, and the child may not receive enough support or consistency from the other parent.
In this regard, Nicosia, Wong, Shier, Massachi, and Datar (2017) indicated that children need consistency in their lives so that they can manage the problems and adversity that come their way during the growth and development phases of their adolescence. Without this consistency, they are at risk of lacking adequate academic skills and follow-through (Nicosia, Wong, Shier, Massachi & Datar, 2017). A series of deployments and the process of reintegration that follows deployment may interrupt this developmental process (Knobloch-Fedders, Yorgason, Ebata & McGlaughlin, 2017). Consistency is of great relevance in seeking to ensure that a child’s learning process is not hampered in any shape or form. In some instances, transfers from one school to another could be a complex undertaking. This example is particularly the case where credits are not transferrable between institutions – effectively meaning the learner risks starting all over again. This can have an unfortunate effect on the student, and both parents and teachers should be aware of the trials students experience due to military deployment (De Pedro et al., 2018).
Lester et al. (2016) discovered that the impact on children resulting from war-related deployment of parents was significantly negative. They showed that parents who experience depression or PTSD during or after deployment also negatively impact the lives of their children and affect the child’s ability to socially and emotionally adjust to their environments. Thus, deployment has impacts beyond a mere absence; when parents return, they do not always return in the same mental and emotional state they were in when they left. They may be bringing back psychological baggage or trauma that, in turn, impacts the child even after the deployment has ended. There are residual effects of deployment that must be considered when it comes to assessing how children of military parents are affected by war. They indicate that the military community must be more mindful and supportive of military families where children are involved, as they are vulnerable and at risk. Turner, Finkelhor, Hamby, and Henly (2017) supported the findings of Lester et al. (2016) with their study, which compared two groups—children of deployed parents and children of non-deployed parents—to see whether one group showed signs of adversity, trauma, delinquency, or victimization. Their cross-sectional surveys conducted over six years from a total sample of more than 13,000 participants, showed the children of deployed parents demonstrated more vulnerability to adversity, delinquency, trauma, and victimization compared to children of non-deployed parents. Turner et al. (2017) revealed that a deployed parent who is involved in a mission abroad would likely be absent in the home. Upon returning, the parent may be back and able to provide a physical presence, but the mission overseas can take its toll on the mental health of the parent. Thus making the situation at home all the more tense and stressful for the child, who sees the parent as the same but does not understand the psychological change that has taken place on the parent. In many cases, the parent is even unaware of the trauma; even though signs may be there that, something has changed (Turner et al., 2017).
Earlier studies, like the one by Brownfield and Thompson (1991), provided evidence that suggested no relationship among youths, families, and delinquency, positing that social learning and social control theories were inadequate theoretical frameworks for explaining adversity among children and adolescents. However, other researchers, such as Koon-Magnin, Bowers, Langhinrichsen-Rohling, and Arata (2016), who used self-control theory and social learning theory to explain why adolescent girls and boys deviate into delinquency, later countered their study. Both studies indicate, nonetheless, that there is a relationship between family and child behavior, with parents acting as a moderating force.
Trier, Pappas, Bovitz, and Augustyn (2018) conducted an important case study of a six-year-old child who had been diagnosed with global developmental delay and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder following the deployment of his father and the death of his mother. The father reported feeling unprepared and overwhelmed by the task of raising the child alone when called back home by the military (Trier et al., 2018). He felt cognitively and emotionally unready for the responsibility; moreover, he was suffering from emotional issues stemming from both the effects of war-related deployment and the loss of his wife. The combined effect of these stressors also spilled over to impact his six-year-old child. The father reported feeling isolated from his community and cut-off from others, as though there were something wrong with him. Trier et al.’s (2018) case study showed that the impacts of deployment on the child can be deeply felt and can be one of several factors that prevent development from progressing appropriately. The study also illustrates the challenges deployed parents face after returning home, which are entirely different from the challenges one encounters on the battlefield and require a completely different set of skills, especially when the child is at a young age.
The case study by Trier et al. (2018) supported the model of development put forward by Erikson. Erikson’s eight stages of development theory helped to explain even what children go through as they age. Although the eight stages cover all of life up to death, the first five stages cover childhood, from infancy to young adulthood (Shriner & Shriner, 2014). Each stage is defined by the psychosocial conflict that characterizes that specific development stage. In other words, at each stage of development, the child (and later the adult) experiences conflict, and in order to move successfully on to the next stage of development, the conflict needs to be resolved.
The first stage of Erikson’s model is called the Trust vs. Mistrust stage, and it is typically experienced between the ages of zero and two (Trier et al., 2018). The second stage of Erikson’s model is the Autonomy vs. Shame stage, which is usually experienced from ages two to three. The third stage is the Initiative vs. Guilt stage, and the child passes through it between agesthree to five. The fourth stage is the Industry vs. Inferiority stage, which occurs from ages five to twelve. The fifth stage is the Identity vs. Role Confusion, which lasts from ages twelve to eighteen (Shriner & Shriner, 2014). As can be seen, the very first stage of development is the Trust vs. Mistrust stage, and the child needs a nurturing caregiver to develop a trusting relationship.
Each stage of Erikson’s model is a span of learning, interacting with surroundings, and gaining experience and knowledge that can shape the child’s outlook for years to come (Trier et al., 2018). That is why it is so important to make sure the child’s environment is happy and healthy. If a parent is deployed during this time, the long-term adverse effects can be significant; as showed in the case study by Trier et al. (2018). In such cases, the child must be taken back to the earlier stages, psychologically speaking, so that the conflict of that stage can be faced and overcome (Perry, 2006). This shows the seriousness of making sure all of the child\\\\\\\'s needs are met at these crucial developmental levels.
In terms of research that suggeststhat children who face adversity are not necessarily put at a disadvantage, Tough (2013) shows that children need to be challenged in order to develop their resiliency and grit. Tough (2013) argues that grit and resilience are what will inevitably assist the child in overcoming the challenges they will face as they grow—all of which will become harder and harder if they are not pushed to become resilient as children. Tough (2013) explicitly states that “when kindergarten teachers are surveyed about their students, they say that the biggest problem they face isnot children who are unaware of their letters and numbers; it is children who do not know how to manage their tempers or calm themselves down after a provocation” (p. 17). He claims that children have to be trained to control themselves, which is where self-control theory often comes into play for the proponents of allowing children to develop grit.By challenging children or allowing them to be challenged, they can learn for themselves what it means to pick oneself up and put in the effort to overcome the obstacle.
The study by Von Culin, Tsukayama, and Duckworth (2014) also suggests adversity is helpful for children, as it teaches them the value of cultivating grit and resiliency and teaches them to learn self-determination, self-efficacy, confidence, andperseverance. Academic success, the building up of social capital, and the successful attainment of goals have also been attributed to the cultivation of grit and resilience. Robertson-Kraft and Duckworth (2014), and Perkins-Gough (2013) states, “grit predicts success over and beyond talent. When you consider individuals of equal talent, the grittier ones do better” (p. 16). According to these authors, success is mediated by one’s level of determination and ability to overcome adversity.
Additionally, according to Eskreis-Winkler, Duckworth, Shulman, and Beal (2014), “the tendency to sustain passion and perseverance for long-term goals, is a domain-general trait that promotes ‘showing up’ across diverse life contexts” (p. 37) and is determined by the development of one’s grit and capacity for resilience. In short, “grittier students [are] more likely to graduate from high school” and succeed in reaching their goals in life (Eskreis-Winkler et al., 2014, p. 36). Each of these studies suggests that to worry too much about children facing diversity as a result of a deployed parent may be to deny them the bit of adversity they need to go through in order to develop resiliency in life. These arguments could potentially serve to reduce some of the stress and guilt that deployed parents may face as they struggle with knowing that they are not there at home for their children. Accepting these arguments would allow the deployed parent to accept deployment more readily and expect the family at home to be able to accept it as well: a little adversity, after all, could be considered suitable for one in the long term.
Thus, the research suggests that there is a need to find a balance between over-analyzing the harmful effects of deployment on a child and emphasizing the positive impact of a child who receives the opportunity to experience adversity and gain resilience through it. The child who never gets pushed, challenged, or tasked with facing the difficulties of a demanding situation could end up lacking resilience and grit and thus face increased adversity later on in life. The child who does face adversity and is a challenge to digdeep within himself to overcome obstacles is more likely to achieve success.
The Supportive Role of Community
Research performed by O\\\\\\\'Neal, Mallette, and Mancini (2018) emphasized the need for community support for military families. It is also essential for families to be open to community support, as their unfavorable opinion of the community in which they live can harm the child or student’s development (O’Neal et al., 2018). Communities play an extra-familial role in assisting children development and in helping students to cope with moving, transferring from one school to another, and finding a place outside the home where they can make friends and develop his or her support network. Parents sometimes struggle to recognize the value of their communities. When parents are disengaged from the community or have an unfavorable opinion of a community, it can harm their child’s progress (Castro et al., 2015; Epstein et al., 2018). Parent perspectives reveal that they can feel helpless in providing support for their children academically and socially but that they do not always trust external environments to be good for them either, because of the possibility of bad influences, such as drugs or pre-marital sex (Kelley et al., 2016).
In order to understand how communities and environments can be impactful in people\\\\\\\'s lives, it is helpful to consider Bandura\\\\\\\'s (2018) assessment of how the environment impacts people\\\\\\\'s behavior. Bandura (2018) explained that the cognitive development and behavior of people are affected by three main factors or agencies—media, peers (family, parents, and friends), and groups (such as schools and churches). Parents thus play a significant role in advocating for and supporting their children, but peers, groups, and media all play a part in that as well (Cheng & Huang, 2018). When dealing with deployment, parents may struggle as they make adjustments in new communities or seek to find ways to fill gaps in their lives that were filled by a parent who is now gone. To address this issue, communication becomes a vital tool, and the way it helps in the digital age can be done through the use of social media. Since people are highly influenced by media (Bandura, 2018), using this tool can help to address some of the stress in families where deployment has occurred. Schools can use it, and teachers can effectively communicate with parents using social media platforms like Facebook (Ellison & Evans, 2016).
Communicating with parents and families is essential in maintaining a stableand core relationship with students and families. The research shows that parents prefer social media as a communication method and that they would like to see more teachers use it, as it is the most convenient and most often checked message system utilize throughout the day (Thompson, Mazer & Flood Grady, 2015). Thus, teachers should go out of their way to provide parents with email updates and text messaging to keep them abreast of developments in the school. However, not every family will have access to cell phones or computers, so there must be an alternate means of communicating available (Graham-Clay, 2009).
Social media has become the dominant mode of communication in the 21st century, and parents and teachers can use it to coordinate, collaborate, communicate and assist one another in the educative process (Thompson et al., 2015). A crucial point for parent-teacher relationships that work to facilitate the success of the student is to implement a plan that connects parents and families by communicating through social media and written letters when social media is not useful for families. Another key is to obtain feedback from parents on culture; this means teachers should develop cultural competency in line with Leininger\\\\\\\'s (2008) theory of transcultural care.
Another way in which communities can become more assertive is through community works, whether they are theater projects such as plays and musicals or public tasks like cleaning up parks. The point is they should be social in nature and orientation. As Bandura (2018) points out, children learn from peers and groups—those are the two primary learning sources for children aside from media. So when children see peers and groups devoting themselves to something positive in the community, they naturally respond by joining in. The effort by the community shows the child that the members of the community are committed, which helps to reinforce behavioral expectations for the child, as explained by Bandura (2018). Efforts by the community also show the child that their parents and other adults in the community care about his or her development, and even though a parent may be deployed, the child is not alone. Additionally, the family is encouraged whenever there is outreach made by members of the community, whether it be a teacher or a principal or a coach. Whenever individuals of this role visit the home, it helps to bridge a gap between that social world and the homeworld and thus strengthen the overall support system of the child (Stetson et al., 2012).
Another option is for the community to offer intervention programs like those used for early starters, i.e., children at risk of future delinquency. These intervention programs would be a preventive measure to reduce the risk of future problems stemming from parent deployment. One specific treatment option is trauma-informed care, as recommended by Espinosa, Sorensen, and Lopez (2013). Espinosa et al. (2013) showthat many young people who venture into delinquency do so because they suffer from some form of trauma that prevents them from adjusting socially to their environment. The way they argue to address the situation is through trauma-informed systems, in which all programs and agencies ‘‘infuse and sustain trauma awareness, knowledge, and skills into their organizational cultures, practices, and policies” (p. 1833). The military community that adopts a trauma-informed system with children of deployed parents would make sense from the perspective of the findings of Espinosa et al. (2013).
One of the benefits of a community-based trauma-informed approach to helping children is that attention is focused on the child’s mental health issues rather than on whatever problems the child may be having at home, in school, or the community (Lester et al., 2016). The aim is to provide support for the child to cope with the trauma likely lying at the heart of his actions and likely stemming, in the case of children of deployed parents, from the deployment and its effects on the parents (Lester et al., 2016). The purpose is to provide understanding, nurturing, and helping aids to children so that they can develop and reach their potential, which otherwise might be stymied by the effects of parental deployment (Espinosa et al., 2013; Lester et al., 2016). Since the approach promotes and fosters the child’s mental health, and many children usually do not have this kind of support when left on their own, there are few potential drawbacks (Espinosa et al., 2016).
There are also after school programs, which are a primary level prevention program as they “focus on the conditions that could lead to delinquent behavior such as truancy, poor parenting, and prenatal exposure to toxins” (Listwan, 2013, p. 5). Secondary-level programs might be more productive, such as Big Brother and Big Sister programs. These programs are geared towards youths who lack adult role models and would fit well suited for children whose parents are deployed. Such children tend to need guidance more than others do, and these secondary programs could aid in the development of the child. Youth do tend to receive positive support and can build their confidence from these programs, though, as Herrera, Grossman, Kauh, and McMaken (2011) point out, the success rate is not always sustainable.
Resiliency
Resiliency is further considered as a helpful strategy and tool of military parents who are deployed and who must care for their children despite their deployment (O’Neal et al., 2018). The military already provides focus on resiliency through the Army’s Master Resiliency Training program, which focuses on helping military personnel to maintain positive attitudes in the face of obstacles. Resiliency is something that military parents can utilize to help bring positivity to their own children’s lives, especially during the chaotic times of stress when deployment and relocation occurs. Spitzer and Aronson (2015) noted three areas of positive psychology. The first key area is awareness of self. Awareness is necessary for the second strategic source, which is self-regulation; this involves both monitoring and regulating emotions and thoughts but also being willing to express oneself in a healthy way. Third, one must be able to see the good in things while being realistic about what one can control, and this is what is meant by optimism. Mental agility is also required, and it refers to the ability to be flexible and follows from one\\\\\\\'s ability to be optimistic. One needs strength to overcome obstacles as well as the ability to build relationships and make connections with people by putting himself in another\\\\\\\'s shoes.
Military parents can find positive psychology to be useful in strengthening their relationships with their children. Helping military parents develop the positive psychology that is needed to cope with the wide range of challenges and obstacles that are left behind by deployed parents. Such challenges and obstacles include helping young people with their academic pursuits as well as assisting adolescents during this transitional and uncertain period in their lives (Sandoz & Moyer, 2015). Besides helping military parents, Spitzer and Aronson (2015) also noted that teachers might use these same strategies to help promote positivity among students who are struggling as a result of military deployment or some other destabilizing influence in the home or community.
Once the aforementioned areas of positive psychology are understood, parents can also focus on identifying triggers—events or thoughts that trigger a particularly adverse reaction. When patterns appear, individuals can begin to see the trend in one’s thoughts or feelings that push one into negative moods or the desire to seek escape in an unhealthy manner (Spitzer &Aronson, 2015). Other areas military parents could focus on are simple breathing exercises, which can help one to regain composure in a stressful period, problem-solving, and developing the ability to show gratitude (Bennett, 2018). The military teaches in its positive psychology training on resiliency that members should learn how to recognize counterproductive thoughts by owning them and taking responsibility for them. The errors that people make in trying to stop negative thoughts is that they try to reduce the noise they make by ignoring them—or they might try to justify why they have them—or they may simply try to deny the thoughts exist at all (Spitzer &Aronson, 2015).
A military parent knows that reality must be dealt with head-on, so, inthe event of negative thoughts, the key to overcoming them is to acknowledge them, own them, and assume responsibility for them by addressing them directly. This is an important consideration to keep in mind as parents try to cope with what their children are experiencing at home. As Alfano et al. (2016) point out, military parents are in a challenging situation regarding their children. While many of them are aware of the difficulties, they do not often take into consideration how their military training can be used to help their family members cope with the deployment back home. Resiliency does not only play a part in the lives of the deployed parents, but it also plays a role in the lives of their children. Therefore, Liebenberg and Ungar (2015) show that social supports are significant factors in developing resilience, self-esteem, confidence, and a sense of self-worth among young children. If children have no strong social supports, they are less likely to develop these characteristics.
Ensuring the child of a deployed parent has other support options outside the home can be an excellent way to help develop their resiliency. It is not always going to be a matter of obliging the child to make it alone or to overcome obstacles without assistance. Tough (2013) argues that obstacles and challenges are necessary for children to learn grit and resiliency. Still, Theron et al. (2015) show that a robust social support system can facilitate the development of grit and resiliency. This is also the perspective of Webster and Rivers (2018). They find that the conventional notion of a child overcoming adversity by himself, which is what is often associated with the development of grit and resiliency, is simply unrealistic. They posited that children need a supportive environment, which correlates with Erikson’s theory of development, particularly in the earlier stages of development wherein most children need at least love and some form of nurturing from a parent in order to face the conflicts of each of the early development stages.
Tempski et al. (2015) point out that “resilience has been considered as a process, where an individual, to be considered resilient, must have those personal characteristics tested in an objective or subjective adversity” (p. 1). Resiliency is defined by Tempski et al. (2015) “as the result of the interaction among the individual, his/her social support environment, and the adversity, including his/her subject values, cultural, social, and ethical influences” (p. 1). Like Theron et al. (2015), Tempski et al. (2015) note that resilience is not something one develops on one’s own but insteadthrough the negotiation of moving parts. The child is at the center while the adversity seemingly surrounds him—but piercing through adversity are the encouragement and positive motivation of the child’s support environment.
Positive psychology plays a significant role in developing resiliency as well, for both parents and children and even for developing relationships. Building on Adler’s principles of psychology, themselves rooted in the humanistic tradition, positive psychology emphasizes the ability of the person to become healthier by focusing on what it takes to be happy. It has been used to help promote the idea of resilience and grit (Bondy, Ross, Gallingane, & Hambacher, 2007), and one particular model is Seligman’s (2018) idea of PERMA, a happiness model developed by one of the leading advocates of positive psychology in the field.
PERMA (Positive Emotion, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, and Accomplishment) is Seligman’s (2018) theoretical model of happiness, which is named after the qualities that define or promote happiness. Positive emotion is used to connect a person to happiness. Engagement is used to focus the person on something enjoyable, a hobby, a work activity, or an activity to stay active and in a good place. Relationships are recommended because they help to maintain social interactions and healthy support systems. Meaning is one of the most important aspects of positive psychology as it serves as the foundation, the purpose of life. Without meaning, many are lost and directionless. Accomplishment helps to develop a sense of achievement through enhancing overall well-being and motivation in a positive direction. (Seligman, 2018).
One popular method of achieving PERMA is using prospection (Roepke & Seligman, 2016; Vaillant, 2000).Prospection is a tool of positive psychology that can help summon positive energy to confront challenges. It refers to the art of seeing oneself in the future and imagining how one’s future self-attained the place where it is in one’s mind. By merely having a positive mental picture, one can begin to imagine ways to achieve success by disabling negative thoughts. Prospection is a technique that is recommended by positive psychologists like Roepke and Seligman (2016) to counter stress and anxiety. It could be especially useful in helpingdeployed parents to cope with stressors and issues as they struggle to find a balance between deployments and being a parent from a distance.
Deployed parents should not wait for problems to find them; instead, they can engage in preventive maintenance in order to maintain a positive mindset from a position of resilience through programs like READY. READY (REsilience and Activity for every DaY) is a resilience program used in many different organizations and settings that aims to promote everyday psychosocial well-being for individuals (Burton, Pakenham & Brown, 2010) by focusing on nurturing a positive view of oneself. Thisconcept can help individuals create better environments for the future. Rather than waiting for problems to happen and then addressing them through psychiatry, positive psychology through READY focuses instead on preventing problems in the future by creating great, positive working environments in places where stress and anxiety typically take over. READY also uses prospection to help individuals see their positive future selves and take steps to achieve those selves. It is thus another option that deployed parents and teens could both use to engage with the adversity of deployment in a positive manner and to stay focused on achieving success.
The military promotes positive psychology through its Master Resiliency Training (MRT). The Army thus uses a positive psychology program to help leaders support soldiers dealing with anxiety and depression (Reivich, Seligman & McBride, 2011). The MRT program aims to create a more resilient soldier. It indicates that future military leaders will focus on positivity and mindfulness to assist in personal challenges and promoting the attainment of goals.There is also the SMART (Stress Management and Resilience Training) program, which focuses on reducing a person’s anxiety levels and being more focused on staying positive (Loprinzi, Prasad, Schroeder & Sood, 2011). It enables people to identify their anxiety triggers and develop a variety of different methods that can help them to avoid their anxiety triggers or even to counter the triggers with positive thoughts. The ways to achieve a positive state in the SMART program are to focus on Self-awareness, Self-regulation, Optimism, Mental agility, Character strengths, and forming connections. By focusing on these areas, one can then pursue the 6-step plan to help implement positive psychology at the societal level. Each of these steps reflects prospection and PERMA: seeing one’s future self, keeping a positive attitude, pursuing happiness, building relationships, having meaning, achieving goals, and sharing with others (Seligman, 2018). The goal of these programs is always to nurture a positive view of one’s self and to nurture positive thoughts.
Nurturing positive thoughts has been shown to play a vital role in negotiating adversity. This is useful in understanding how deployed parents deal with the challenges of parenting, particularly as it relates to their efforts in assisting their children to maintain a degree of academic success. The six-step plan recommended by Seligman (2018) is to, first, adopt a positive perspective by seeing your best future self; second, find the things that make one happy; third, focus on building positive relationships; fourth, search for meaning; fifth, savor accomplishments; and, sixth, share with others. According to Seligman’s (2018), positive emotion is maintained through a sense of appreciation, peace, and hope while engagement is maintained by fully immersing oneself in one’s work. Additionally, relationships are maintained by developing authentic relationships in both work and play. Meaning is maintained by being mindful of helping others by volunteering at least one hour each week, and a sense of accomplishment is maintained by achieving daily personal goals.This model could be applied between parents and their children, with both coordinating on implementing the model despite the distance they experience during deployment. This model would be harder to implement with a deployed parent of a younger child. Still, the parent at home could likely facilitate the implementation by maintaining the right level of mindfulness throughout the deployment and providing assistance and guidance for the child.
How Technology Plays a Part
Technology is another option that can be considered helpful in addressing the needs of learners who are in a military family with one or more deployed parents. Technology can help in several ways. Today, the technology exists to put students in contact with people on the other side of the world in an instant. Parents who are deployed can maintain a closer connection with children while they are deployed thanks to streaming services that allow for face time through the Internet. However, technology can also play a part in connecting older students with additional opportunities in terms of schooling—such as online schooling (Thompson et al., 2015).
Technology has long been viewed as an efficient tool in the university classroom because it provides greater ease of access to learning for students who are digital natives (Henderson, Selwyn & Aston, 2017). This helps in not having to worry about transfers or relocating to a new campus, as all education is taken online. Students can tap into the enormous library of information that is the Internet. They can pull up manuscripts and primary sources that have been uploaded to servers somewhere on the planet, which allowseveryone to see. What was once contained in a library that one would physically have to go to observe is now readily available with the click of a few buttons, which can be keyed while in a classroom.
Because technology is so attractive to digital natives and so interactive, it is inherently an active learning tool that educators can use to engage students more fully and create opportunities for them in class. The technology exists for streaming films shared on YouTube, uploading feedback for students and their parents via web portals like Blackboard, distance learning, and more. The fact that students can now take classes online without ever having to set foot on campus is a significant innovation that is a startling reminder of just how far technology has come—and the extent to which it has advanced the educational system. Parents are not often cognizant of the opportunities that exist to help them with children, but awareness of digital technology is one that must be developed more thoroughly (Epstein et al., 2018). By opening the eyes to what new technology can do, parents, communities, and students can achieve a higher synthesis of support. Technology can even be used to help students in destabilized families like those where military parents are deployed, as Chang (2017) has shown. Chang (2017) identified the secret to her success at rejuvenating her school district via the incorporation of more technology into the classroom:
Students who struggle are often more dependent on technology to learn. More affluent kids are used to lots of technology because they could afford it. We could afford the same technology. For disadvantaged students, their access to technology needs to increase in order to close the opportunity gap. (Chang, 2017, p. 12)
In short, by bringing digital technology into the classroom, educators can help struggling students achieve their potential. Parents too often are unaware of the positive role that technology can play in their children’s lives, and one of the ways that they can help their children is to give them positive self-images and to provide them with ways to enhance their self-image (Spitzer & Aronson, 2015).
Teachers especially can play a role in enhancing students’ self-image to empower them to take ownership of their academic careers (Yeager & Walton, 2011). These exercises are not often ones that parents are aware of, and they are as simple as asking children to imagine what they would like to be or what they would like to do for a career. The point of these exercises is to get students to think more imaginatively about their lives, so they are not overburdened by the present, which may be difficult considering the disadvantageous nature of their home life (Spitzer & Aronson, 2015).
However, if students, parents, and teachers can collaborate in bringing positive psychology into the lives of students, military parents could see benefits in the lives of their children\\\\\\\'s academic careers. Technology should not be ignored (Prensky, 2001), as it can be a useful tool for bringing parents and children together over long distances so that they can stay in contact and deployed parents can be part of children’s lives. Alternatively, this may be difficult for some military parents to do, given their circumstances (Chang, 2017). Some evaluation of the circumstances is needed in order to gain perspectives on whether the use of technology is aconvenient solution to keep parents and children connected. In addition to being useful in a school environment, technology can help open up new worlds for the student (Prensky, 2001).
There are dangers to exposing children to too much technology, particularly with the rise of social media and its influence on and popularity among adolescents today. Teens can be exposed to personalized advertisements that can play on their impulses (Chester & Montgomery, 2008). They can also be exposed to negative impressions that arise from jealousy or envy at another’s social media account (Appel, Gerlach & Crusius, 2016; Freberg, Graham, McGaughey & Freberg, 2011). The more exposed to social comparison via social media, the more likely the child or adolescent is to experience envy, anxiety, and depression.Thus, too much media can cause the individual child or teen to regress and lose whatever positive momentum was gained from earlier positive usage of technology in a controlled or monitored environment—i.e., with a parent or teacher.
The Role of the Teacher
Communication through technology such as email, text messaging, and social media usage are methods that teachers can use to coordinate and collaborate with parents more effectively. In fact, parents prefer these methods: “an increase in parents’ preference for frequent e-mail communication as well as for emerging modes of parent-teacher communication such as text messaging and social media” are the primary modes of communication that parents wish teachers would use more of (Thompson, Mazer, & Flood-Grady, 2015, p. 187). Facebook can be used to schedule face-to-face meetings or to share information. It is often underutilized as a tool in parent-teacher communication (Thompson et al., 2015).
Another solution is to enhance the role of the teacher. Parents are often unaware of the fact that teachers can make home visits to provide additional support to learners (Stetson, Stetson, Sinclair & Nix, 2012). One-way to get teachers and parents working together to provide community support for children of deployed parents is for teachers to make home visits to the houses of these students throughout the year. Nothing shows families who are going through a difficult time, such as deployment, that teachers care more than when the teacher makes a home visit (Wright & Shields, 2018).
A teacher is generally thought of as the person who provides lessons on whatever subject the student is expected to learn—but if the teacher appears to the student as a real live human being who exists outside of the classroom, it gives the student more context and a greater appreciation for who the teacher is (Stetson et al., 2012). It shows the student that the teacher cares for him and wants him to succeed. Seligman (2018) identifies this type of support as part of the PERMA model for happiness, as it includes a healthy amount of engagement, and the teacher can assist the student in prospection, helping the student to form a vision of a future self. Thus, while the deployed parent is away, the teacher helps to fill a gap, which is in line with the Epstein (2018) theoretical framework.
Additionally, when families see teachers showing a vested interest in the lives of their students beyond the classroom, it can motivate both parents and students to become more invested in their education (Whyte & Karabon, 2016). For that reason, Whyte and Karabon (2016) recommend home visits for teachers who are looking to promote the value of education, especially in communities suffering from destabilized families and lack of leadership. The teacher is in a position to fill a gap in the leadership in the community, and the home visit is an excellent way for that to happen.
However, the parents must be on board with teachers making home visits (Stetson et al., 2012). The role of parents in the education of children cannot be underestimated. If teachers are the educators setting the example in the school, parents are the educators setting the example in the home. Teachers and parents must work together and be on the same page in order to provide students with the consistency of example and continuity in their educative experience (Wright & Shields, 2018). The school always strives to reflect the values of the community and work with parents to define those values. As Bolles and Patrizio (2016) show, military parents already have the military sense of discipline and hierarchy ingrained into their mindsets, so it makes sense that they should seek to develop an interdisciplinary approach to providing support for their children by working long-distance with teachers to make home visits or to provide some form of extra-curricular support for their children.
The teacher also must be mindful of culture. Culture holds a particular significance in education because it provides the foundation and background of a student\\\\\\\'s experience; it gives the foundation of the student\\\\\\\'s ideas and beliefs, and it shapes the lens that offers a view on the student\\\\\\\'s outlook (Doge & Keller, 2014). By considering culture, a teacher can better connect with students and provide an atmosphere in the classroom that is conducive to sharing, responding, and learning (Saifer, 2011). Educational attainment requires that students engage with the information that is presented to them in their lessons, and one of the best ways to get students to want to engage is to connect the lesson to their backgrounds and cultural experience (Kea, Campbell-Whatley, & Richards, 2006).
The role of culturally responsive teaching in educational attainment is to be the pathway towards cultural diversity. The teacher helps students to define the learning goals, question traditional concepts, understand student diversity, engage with the material, and effectively work towards knowledge acquisition through participation (Kea et al., 2006). Numerous factors can affect the educational attainment of students. The culturally responsive teacher must address these factors so that all the issues that might affect a student’s capacity to learn are removed. It is important to note that developing cross-cultural competency and sensitivity is a continuous rather than a static enterprise that demands ongoing commitment on the part of teachers (Dahlman, 2014).
Three factors that can affect the child of the deployed parent’s educational attainment are (1) socio-economic background, (2) parental involvement, and (3) school structure (Thompson, Corsello, McReynolds, & Conklin-Powers, 2013). These factors can influence students in various ways. As each student is different, teachers will need to get to know their students and develop an understanding of their own unique, personal needs. One way to do this is to make “home visits,” which can facilitate and foster strong relationships between and among students, their families, and the teacher (Stetson et al., 2012). By making such visits, the teacher can also develop a better sense of the student’s socio-economic background and the level of parental involvement. The third factor (school structure) is one that may be outside the control of the teacher but will have an impact, nonetheless.
Socio-economic status can affect educational attainment by causing stress for students if the socio-economic life of the student is subpar (Thompson et al., 2013). This factor can be determined by the neighborhood in which the student lives, the family status of the student, the family\\\\\\\'s income, the family\\\\\\\'s place in the community, and so on. If these elements contribute positively to the student\\\\\\\'s life by providing stability and support, they can be beneficial to educational attainment. Conversely, if they are lacking, these same factors may serve as obstacles.
Parental involvement is another factor that can affect educational attainment. The level to which parents involve themselves in their child\\\\\\\'s life will affect that child\\\\\\\'s success in school (Perna & Finney, 2014). Involvement can range from listening to the child, offering advice or guidance, helping with development issues, teaching the child to have an ethical base or moral sense, and being emotionally supportive. Parental involvement could also be assessed via parental attendance of PTA meetings, class or school events, responses to teacher emails or notes, and so forth. Further, as Vijaya, Vijaya, and Rajeshkumar (2016) observe, parental involvement in education could take the form of \\\\\\\"providing encouragement, arranging for appropriate study time and space, modeling desired behavior (such as reading for pleasure), monitoring homework, and actively tutoring their children at home” (p. 11). It is important to note that when a parent is actively involved in the school and class-work undertakings of their children, student achievement is further promoted due to the impact that the said involvement has not only on the classroom behavior of a student but also on their self-concept and attitude.
Educational attainment affects students in the long term because education sets the stage for the future life of the student. A student who fails to achieve academic success will find it harder to obtain a good-paying career in the future because not having an education limits one’s opportunities and choices when it comes to finding a job (Perna & Finney, 2014). A student’s human and social capital might suffer as a result, and the student could end up being caught in a poor socio-economic state where there is no way out because education was never achieved. This suboptimal outcome can have corresponding social, economic, and psychological effects on the student over the long-term.
The teacher should be viewed as a pillar, not just in the classroom but also in the community. For that reason, the teacher should be willing to make home visits to establish betterties that are needed to foster good and healthy relationships. These relationships are required in order to ensure that educational attainment is possible (Perna & Finney, 2014). It is about investing in one another, giving time to one another so that students can realize their potential and see that they have a strong support system in place that will help them to overcome whatever obstacles they may be facing (Perna & Finney, 2014). The teacher can make this happen by being visible support for students and by connecting to their families so that a bond is established. The relationship of trust is very important in education because it sets the tone for students and gives them a way to open and engage with the material that they might otherwise never fully engage with in the first place. In other words, establishing a meaningful rapport with parents can help teachers provide them with the guidance and feedback they need to participate in their children’s education actively.
The teacher of today should use scaffolding to build on what the learners have learned in the past, as this is the most natural and effective way to continue and promote the learning process. Yet students need to know that what they have already inside them in terms of knowledge is a support for moving forward and obtaining new knowledge. The challenge that one might encounter with implementing this approach is that not all students in a classroom are going to be at the same level internally. Some will require more imaginative play than others, and some will be ready to process more information more quickly than others. Each student may require a degree of individual attention or special instruction—but having a studio-style classroom, for instance, can help to overcome this challenge.For, as Rosa and Montero show, it was Vygotsky’s claim that “development occurs through equilibrium with the environment” (Moll, 1990, p. 71). It was also this claim that got him into trouble with the Soviets, who believed that “the individual capacity for autonomous action [was] independent of environmental influence” (Moll, 1990, p. 71). Vygotsky certainly made the case that “psychological processes have a cultural origin” (Moll, 1990, p. 79). In other words, there is no way to divorce or separate the cognitive development of the individual from the environment. To argue that such was possible was to ignore the social character of human nature and to imagine that human beings could simply be programmed like computers and not rely upon interaction with the environment in any way.
Teachers should permit students to interact with one another in order to help each other to learn and process information. In this manner, they share ideas and get one another on the same page more quickly, more naturally, and more effectively. Again, it is part of the normal process of socialization, which, as Vygotsky points out in the zone of proximal development, is what allows children to learn and develop. This supports Epstein et al.’s (2018) theory of the parent-teacher-community relationship in helping students to reach their academic goals: students need community life in order to grow and develop. Learners can do a great deal of developing on their own and rather rapidly,as long as they are provided the time and space to engage with one another and with the materials on their own. The teacher should always be there to guide and support when necessary. Cultural mediation can come into play here, as Cole points out;cultural mediation alters the structure of human psychological functions (Moll, 1990). Thus, in formal schooling, the challenge is that it takes individuals out of their natural habitat and places them in an artificial setting, which essentially requires them to navigate two worldssimultaneously.
Summary
In summation, the military family is likely to suffer from a parent’s deployment, especially as children are concerned. Children’s academic life will face disturbances, and as Epstein (2011) indicates, the best way to examine this type of situation is through the three-fold relationship of parents, school, and community. This literature review has examined those three fields in detail to show how each one plays a role in the advancement of the student\\\\\\\'s concerns when home life is disrupted by a deployment. The research offers a variety of options and opinions on the matter. Some researchers believe that a little adversity is good for the child and that it can teach the child to develop grit and resilience (Tough, 2013). Others believe adversity itself is not educative by itself and that for resiliency to be developed, the child needs a strong support system, whether that be from peers, groups, or others in his life (Webster & Rivers, 2018).The implication is that there should be a balance between allowing the child to face the challenge of parental deployment and leaving the child to face it on his own (Theron et al., 2015). Shielding the child should not be the aim, but rather inviting the community to provide support for the child will have a positive impact in terms of helping the child to realize he has a support system.
Some of the possible scenarios researchers have identified includes the role of the teacher in the student\\\\\\\'s life being enhanced through connectivity outside the classroom (Epstein et al., 2018). Another is the role of the community being enhanced by filling gaps in the learner\\\\\\\'s life that would be otherwise filled by a parent who is deployed (Alfano, Lau, Balderas, & Beidel, 2016). Additionally, there is the role of the parent using some of the training in positive psychology picked up in the military and applying it in the child\\\\\\\'s life to keep the child-focused and upbeat about options for the child\\\\\\\'s future (Alfano et al., 2016). Most of the research to date has focused primarily on the child, the non-deployed parent, and the community to identify support strategies for the children with a deployed military parent (Alfano et al., 2016). Research on military deployment has not effectively or adequately addressed the aspect of the parent, even though the effects of deployment in the military affects not just the children and the family members left behind, but also the service member on duty. It is the desire of each parent, including the military parent in deployment, to undertake their parental roles, including being involved in the education of their children (Turner et al., 2017).
There are various ways, especially in the age of technology, for parents from regardless of their location in the world, to get in touch with their children. Enhancing the child\\\\\\\'s positive self-image is something that teachers can also do as they work with parents to coordinate a possible strategy to help the child think about long-term ideas for the future. Using technology to help give students access to more learning options, such as online schooling or connectivity with deployed parents, is another possibility. The parents who are deployed are not always aware of these options and need to be better educated about them. In the final analysis, therefore, the deployment of parents effectively creates a void in the familial setting.
This study explored the perceptions of deployed military parents regarding active involvement in their child’s education. Education happens to withstand the worst of the resulting disruptions. In addition to shedding more light on the perceptions of deployed parents concerning their influence on the academic achievement of their children, the present study provides a useful assessment of the effects of military deployment on parental involvement. This is important given that the absence of a parental sense of the academic performance of a child is likely to harmparental participation in the learning process. Indeed, as it has been pointed out elsewhere in this text, the relevance of parental involvement in a child\\\\\\\'s academic life cannot be overstated.
The overall approach of positive psychology runs through much of the literature on this subject, for keeping a positive attitude towards the challenge of diversity and using a model like PERMA can help to keep all stakeholders focused on where they need to be mentally and emotionally to provide the best level of support for the child. The more positive parents, whether deployed or not, teachers, coaches, ministers, community members, peers, and groups can be, the more likely the child is to develop a sense of grit and determination and face academic challenges and overcome them (Seligman, 2018).
The next chapter discusses the methodology used for this study by describing the design, research questions, the setting, and the participants; the procedures for collecting data; role of the researcher; what data collection instruments were developed or utilized; how the data was analyzed and how trustworthy the study was. The following chapter also provides ethical considerations
CHAPTER THREE: METHODS
Overview
The purpose of this qualitative transcendental phenomenological study was to explore the perceptions and lived experinces of deployed military parents regarding active involvement in their child’s education. This chapter presents the procedures, research design, and data analysis of the research study. This chapter also discusses the research design, research questions, setting, participants, procedures, the role of the researcher, data collection methods and instruments, data analysis, the trustworthiness of the study, and ethical considerations.
Design
This study utilized aqualitative research methodology. Qualitative research design is ideal when the research seeks to answer “how” and “why” research questions (McMillan, 2012). Qualitative research facilitates the exploration of a problem and allows the researcher to work towards a hypothesis. As this study was concerned with exploring perceptions, the qualitative method was most appropriate. Additionally, a transcendental phenomenological design/approach is ideal when the researcher seeks to obtain an in-depth understanding of a subject who has experienced a phenomenon, which allows the researcher to arrive at a socially constructed meaning (McMillan, 2012; Yazan, 2015). The justification for this design can be found in the positivist doctrine, which posits that research cannot be objectively conducted from the outside, but rather only from the inside (Husserl, 1999). The objective is to see, understand, explain, and make clear the reality faced by military parents who are deployed and their experiences as they attempt to stay involved in their child’s education.
In order to see what the participant sees and to understand what the subject understands, one has to stand where the subject stands and experience what the participant experiences; the researcher, in a sense, must become the subject—not literally—but rather figuratively (Husserl, 1999). As the researcher places themselves in the shoes of the subject, the researcher is able to see the participant’s own experience more clearly and objectively (Husserl, 1999). Thus, the transcendental approach is the most valid way of conducting qualitative research, according to the phenomenological discourse.
Phenomenology is a natural fit with qualitative research when the focus is on individual perceptions that the researcher can experience directly. Creswell (2007) stated that the “basic purpose of phenomenology is to reduce individual experiences with a phenomenon to a description of the universal essence” (p. 58). From this perspective, the main focus of the phenomenological approach is to have an appropriate method for seeing more clearly how the particular relates to the general; it is about coming to an understanding of the universals by way of the personal and the particular. The universal essence that describes the general common experience of human beings can be distilled through an in-depth examination of the lived experience of one’s subject, which in turn can best be done by way of the phenomenological research design (Creswell, 2007). For this study, the more the researcher immersed himself into the world of the military deployed parent, the more ability he had to gather all the relevant data that determines the parameters of the participant’s experience. To discern these parameters from abroad, the researcher must see closely and be close-by, as well as be exposed to the same experiences that are being researched. Thus, the researcher can gain a sense of what the participants feel because the researcher has felt the same things.
Moustakas (1990) noted that in order to research the essence of things fairly, the research design must center on a simple inquiry or question. The phenomenological design facilitates this inquiry by planting a sense of inquiry in the experience of the participants.At the same time, an understanding of the inquiry has to be maintained by adhering to the research question. Through phenomenology, the question serves as the guiding hand, while the researcher immerses himself into the world of the participants (Moustakas, 1990). To keep from becoming lost in countless sensations and in the world of the subject, the researcher maintains tethered to the act of research by way of the research question; everything becomes oriented towards answering that question in the end.
Silverman (2016) has shown the purpose of such research is to provide precise information on a specific situation to help others understand what is taking place, without relying on statistical data. The phenomenological approach allows the researcher to uncover universal themes that can facilitate future research and to understand the experience of the participants better as it is seen, felt, and expressed through their own eyes and words (Silverman, 2016). These themes can also be used to help promote greater understanding among stakeholders.
As the situation under question is specific and focused, the transcendental phenomenological approach fits best as it provides a focused example of the phenomenon. Thus, this study provided military parents who are or have been deployed the opportunity to express and describe their experiences in their children’s education (Lester et al., 2012). This qualitative design was intended to provide the framework in which several data collection methods could be applied, including the use of semi-structured interviews. In addition, questionnaires, focus groups, and artifact analysis were used to develop informed answers to the study’scentral and sub research questions.
Research Questions
The focus of this study centered around one research question. The central research question was: What are the perceptions and lived experinces of deployed military parents regarding active involvement in their child’s education? To interpret future the perception of the military deployed parents, the researcher used the following three sub-questions:
1. How do military parents describe their involvement in their children’s education while deployed?
2. How do military parents perceive the impact of their deployment on the family and particularly on their child’s academic performance?
3. What challenges do military parents who are deployed face from their communities while trying to stay involved in their children’s education?
Setting
The setting for this study was U.S. Army installation, Fort Rapture (pseudonym), which is located in the northeastern part of the United States. The installation at the time of the study had an estimated population of 71,000, of which almost 42,000 were active-duty soldiers. The rest were family members, employees of the Army, and Air Force Exchange Service, volunteers, and other employees (Powers, 2018). The percentage of the 42,000 active duty service members at Fort Rapture that were deployable at any given point in time was classified, but they all had access to the family support services that were provided by the U.S. military for deployed parents.
There were 27 elementary schools, eight middle schools, four high schools, and four special campuses on Fort Rapture. This selection site was suitable because it was the participants’ permanent duty station when not deployed. The organization here was of hierarchical structure and provided safety and order for the participants. A select location and time were chosen for conducting interviews and focus groups after securing permission from participants.
Participants
The population of this research study was U.S. military parents of schooled-aged (Pre-K-12) children who resided in the United States and were in school. According to Creswell (2003), “long interviews with up to 10 people” (p. 65) is appropriate for a phenomenological study. As such, a sample size between 12 to 15respondents was utilized for this research. A combination of criterion-based, snowball sampling methods, and purposeful sampling was used to recruit study participants. Criterion-based sampling was used to identify prospective participants based on specific criteria. Snowball sampling was used to recruit additional participants based on referrals by individuals who enrolled in the study. In order to become a study participant, the prospect had to be deployed or previously deployed within the past two years; anytime longer, and their memories may have begun to fade (Gardner, 2001). Additionally, they were required to have pre-K-12 school-aged children that were at the time in a school outside of the home. Other criteria included a willingness to participate in an interview and online focus group, consent to the use of an audio recording of the interview and focus group, and willingness to share journals, letters, and email correspondence with teachers pertaining to their children while deployed.
According to Kuper, Lingard, and Levinson (2008), purposeful sampling methods are useful in research, as only specific individuals with the phenomenon under study are appropriate participants for this research. Recruitment began by contacting the Fort Rapture public affairs offices regarding the policies and procedures for the placement of recruitment flyers on bulletin boards across the installation (Appendix B). The same flyer was posted on Facebook and other online networks such as LinkedIn and Instagram. Prospective participants were provided an Informed Consent letter that explained the purpose of the study and participation requirements (Appendix C). Additionally, participants were asked to refer other potential participants just in case the desired sample size was not reached. A recruitment letter was emailed or mailed directly to each referral (Appendix D).
Procedures
The first step in the procedure for conducting this research was to obtain IRB approval from Liberty University (see Appendix A). Once IRB approval was granted, the next step was to actively recruit participants, using the methods previously discussed. Prior to participating in interviews, participants were required to review and sign an informed consent form (Appendix C) that details the nature of the study, purpose, risks, and withdrawal rights. The next step was to collect data.
Four methods were used to collect data: Questionnaires, interviews, focus groups, and artifact analysis. Once I received participant’s consent to participate in the study, a questionnaire was sent to gather preliminary demographic data, such as age, race, military affiliation, and years of service (see Appendix E). Additionally, the questionnaire consisted of three open-ended questions that allowed participants to prepare and reflect on their thoughts and feelings about the research question. Once questionnaires were returned, I then contacted each participant to schedule an interview(see Appendix F), which was conducted in a predesignated location chosen by the interviewee.
Each interview lasted for approximately 45-60 minutes. Each interview was conducted using semi-structured interview questions. In case of any arising issues, follow up questions were used for clarification. During the interview, I took notes in order to document appearance, gestures, and unspoken communication that could help in understanding the meaning of the participants’ responses (Creswell & Poth, 2018). Each interview session was audio-recorded, professionally transcribed, and sent to participants for member-checking purposes to validate or clarify responses if needed (Creswell & Poth, 2018). Additionally, prior to attending the interview session, interviewees were asked to carry with them any artifacts that represented or signified their experiences as a deployed military parent.
Requested artifacts included participants’ journals, letters, and email correspondence with teachers pertaining to their children while deployed. During the interview, participants had an opportunity to explain their artifact. This process helped to provide insight into the interactions between parents, teachers and was used to support or challenge what the participant remembered or recalled during the focus group. The last data collection method used focus groups (see Appendix G). Selected participants were gathered in an online forum for 45-60 minutes using videoconferencing software (Zoom). The researcher recorded, downloaded, and professionally transcribed the online session. After transcription, participants were allowed to participate in member checking to verify the accuracy of their responses (Marshall & Rossman, 2014). In all four methods used for data collection, no identifying elements were collected, and only pseudonyms were used to protect the identity of participants. Before conducting each interview and the focus group, I introduced myself, greeted, and welcomed the interviewee(s) and stated the purpose of the study.
The Researcher’s Role
As the human instrument in this study, the researcher’s role is vital towards ensuring that the quality of data collected and the collection procedure is ethical (Creswell & Poth, 2018). My relationship to the participants, therefore, was explained to them so as to be completely transparent and to bracket out bias (Allen, 2015). One way to reduce the risk of bias is to use the bracketing technique by stating upfront the researcher\\\\\\\'s expectations and then accepting the data that is produced by the research (Smith & McSweeney, 2017, p. 292). Therefore, it was stated to participants that I am a United States Army officer and an instructor with the United States Army Recruiting and Retention College. I told them that I had over 13 years of military service in various positions and assignments. Although I did not have direct authority over the particpants, I did point out that I could be considered a member of the population that I was studying based on my experiences and knowledge of the issues. I noted that by better allowing the deployed parent\\\\\\\'s perspective to be understood, improved solutions could be devised. My assumption was that deployed parents perceive themselves as having a minimal impact in the life of their child and that they view their deployment, job, and distance as the main obstacles in assisting in their child\\\\\\\'s educative process.
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