Resilience Among Veterans: An Archival Study

Abstract

To investigate resilience against combat stress, 175 interviews from the Veterans' History Project were coded using the Deployment Risk and Resiliency Inventory and analyzed using the Linguistic Inventory and Word Count. Contrary to hypotheses, higher levels of social support did not predict psychological outcomes, nor did social support differ between wars. Low variance in the social support measure likely contributed to the null results. The amount of combat experiences the veteran discussed did significantly predict psychological outcomes, replicating previous findings. This indicates that the LIWC measures are good indicators of psychological outcome.