Coping With- Stress during Military Basic Training

Within the stress and coping theoretical framework the study examines how concepts experience, appraise and deal with various aspects of life during the 'beginning phase of their military service. A set of self-report instruments measuring potential sources of problems during military service, cognitive appraisals and the ways of coping with stressors was administered on the sample of 449 males within first 7-12 days of their service and taken again in the same sample of recruits five weeks later, i. e. the last "but one week of their military basic training. Specific sources of problems cited by participants as more or less stressful showed to be relatively similar in two measurement points, although the rank of item average values varied to some extent from the very beginning to the final weeks of basic training. The results point to moderately high level of stress intensity and generally low level of perceived controllability of selected categories of situation reported by conscripts. The study showed that active adjusting and passivity were the most frequently used modes of coping followed by reinterpretation, humor and seeking social support, whereas the least frequently used strategies were expression of emotions and negotiation. Small, but significant changes were observed, as in cognitive appraisals so in the ways of coping with selected stressful situations encountered by recruits during basic training. 36 IAMPS Split, CROATIA 2000 64 The findings to be presented in this paper are a part of a larger research project aimed at testing the hypotheses derived from the stress and coping theory by Lazarus and colleagues (Lazarus, 1991, 1993; Lazarus & Folkman, 1984, 1987) as applied to the military service context. As numerous empirical data indicate, entering into army and obligatory military service can be rather demanding for recruits, in terms of both physical and psychological requirements placed on the trainees (e.g., Clemons, 1996; Mikulincer & Florian, 1995; Vickers, Kolar & Hervig, 1989). Empirical evidence further suggests that military environment can be particularly stressful in the initial phase of service, that is, during the basic military training period (e.g., Mayseless & Hai, 1998; Mehlum, 1998). Using the stress and coping theoretical framework, this study thus sought to examine how conscripts experience, appraise and deal with various aspects of life during first two months of their service, i.e., in the course of basic military training. Aside from being theoretically interesting, better understanding of the dynamics and change in the processes of appraisals and coping with specific sources of stress during military can, of course, be valuable from the practical or applied standpoint. The findings are thus expected to be potentially useful in fostering the processes of adjustment to the military environment and improving the training process and performance of recruits in a variety of stressful situations. As is well known, the theory views processes of appraisals and coping as critical mediators of unfavorable person-environment relationship and various immediate and long-term outcomes. According to authors, cognitive appraisals include processes in which people constantly evaluate the significance of what is happening to their personal well-being, whereas coping is defined as a person's ongoing efforts in thought and action to manage specific demands appraised as taxing or overwhelming (Lazarus, 1993). The dynamics of adaptation is seen as an unfolding process of causal antecedents (i.e., individual resources and environmental factors), mediators, and effects (psychological, physiological, and behavioral criteria of adjustment). The present paper was conceived as a preliminary report on some descriptive data on the measures of central constructs of the theory cognitive appraisals of stressful situations and coping strategies employed by conscripts, as well as changes in their reported level in the course of military basic training.