Contact: Jay Teachman, professor of sociology-(360) 650-7214 or jay.teachman@wwu.edu
BELLINGHAM-Western Washington University sociology professor Jay Teachman, along with Lucky Tedrow, director of WWU's Demographic Research Laboratory, has been awarded a $74,785 grant from the National Science Foundation American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to study the impact of military service on health.
During this two-year grant, which began on July 1, Teachman and Tedrow will be analyzing data collected from military volunteers as part of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. Research will be focused primarily on men and women who served in the 1980s and '90s and who are now in their 40s.
Preliminary looks at the data have offered some surprising information, Teachman said.
"I would expect that military veterans should have better physical and mental health than those who weren't in the military," he said. "And they do have better mental health, but their physical health is not better."
The preliminary results offer several avenues of investigation as the research gets fully under way, Teachman said.
"Vets are more likely to be married, and that should make their health better," he said. "They're also less likely to be divorced and more likely to be employed, and both of those should make their physical health better. I'm interested to find out why their health is not better."
One reason for that, Teachman said, is that military veterans are more likely to use alcohol and tobacco. In the course of their research, Teachman and Tedrow hope to discover the factors that predict tobacco and alcohol use among veterans.
Teachman also has noticed that there's no real difference between black and white veterans as far as health goes, and that while black vets in general are much more successful than black non-vets, their health is not better.
"Military service has been a leg up for them; it has given them all the tools they've needed to be successful," Teachman said. "But when it comes to physical health, they don't do better."
This is Teachman's fourth grant from the NSF for research on the consequences of military service.
For more information on this research, contact sociology professor Jay Teachman at (360) 650-7214 or jay.teachman@wwu.edu.
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