Resiliency Among U.S. Air Force Personnel: The Direct and Interactive Influence of Cognitive Fitness and Confidence In Social Connections

Background and Purpose: The United States (U.S.) military needs active-duty service members (SMs) who are adaptable to change, professionally competent, trained, and ready to fulfill their assigned duties, roles, and responsibilities whenever called upon. The U.S. military has focused on increasing SM’s mental and social fitness to bolster resiliency (successful role performance). The Resiliency Model of Role Performance posits that individual assets and social connections account for SM’s differential success in meeting military demands and personal obligations.

We used a U.S. Air Force (AF) active duty dataset to test for a direct, positive relationship between cognitive fitness and both formal and informal social connections, and the impact on successful role performance. We also tested for potential moderating influences of formal and informal social connections on role performance among SMs with low versus high cognitive fitness. To preserve the generalizability of study findings across indicators of social strata within military settings (e.g., pay grade, gender, deployment history), we explore potential variations in cognitive fitness, confidence in social connections, and successful role performance across distinct SM profiles.

Methods: Data were collected from a non-probability purposive sample of AF SMs and civilians (N = 59,094) who completed the Support and Resiliency Inventory (SRI) between November 4, 2011 and January 7, 2014. We focused on the married active-duty subsample (n = 29,387) to capture the scope of navigating multiple roles (e.g., spouse, parent) while meeting military life and work demands. We employed multivariate hierarchical regression analysis across three models to explore the direct and interactive influence of cognitive and social fitness on resiliency. Resiliency of role performance (i.e., resiliency or successful role performance) was the primary dependent variable, operationalized as a continuous measure using the three resiliency items (α = .84, M = 8.67, SD = 1.37) from the SRI questionnaire.

These three items were aggregated using estimation of the mean across items and scaled from 0 to 10, with greater scores indicating higher role performance. Cognitive fitness (M = 8.57, SD = 1.46) and social fitness (i.e., informal support: M = 7.76, SD = 2.09; formal support: M = 5.65, SD = 2.78) were the primary independent variables, higher scores denoting more advanced cognitive skills and greater confidence in social resources.

Results: Controlling for military demographic characteristics, we found a positive linear relationship between cognitive fitness and resiliency and between informal and formal support and resiliency. Informal social support moderated the association between cognitive fitness and resiliency, compensating for resiliency among SMs with lower cognitive fitness.

Conclusions and Implications: Study findings underscore informal social support (e.g., family members, friends) as more essential than formal systems (e.g., military leaders, community agencies) in creating conditions for service members to perform well and experience resiliency. To this end, military mental health clinicians, chaplains, and leaders are encouraged to adopt practices and policies that support military members in strengthening their social connections beyond formal military structures.