An article from the Journal of Marriage and Family (JMF) is the inaugural recipient of the Excellence in Research on Military and Veteran Families Award, a new honor from the Military Family Research Institute (MFRI) at Purdue University.
“Reinstitutionalizing Families: Life Course Policy and Marriage in the Military,” now recognized as the best piece of research on military-connected families published in the past year, appeared in JMF's October 2014 issue. The authors are Jennifer Lundquist, University of Massachusetts Amherst, and Zhun Xu, Renmin University of China. In it, the authors argue that structural conditions of modern military service – including deployment, frequent moves and overarching characteristics of military employment – shape the relationships between spouses and service members. In their argument, the authors bring together life course literatures on turning points, the welfare state, and linked lives to show how military policies are part of an overarching institutional culture that directly and indirectly promotes marriage.
JMF is the flagship journal of The National Council on Family Relations (NCFR), the premier professional association for the multidisciplinary understanding of f amilies. NCFR member Shelley MacDermid Wadsworth is the director of the MFRI.
"Since 2000, the MFRI has worked to wwwelop and promote rigorous research on behalf of military families,” she said. “Furthermore, we are committed to helping organizations that work directly with military families to use such research to create and strengthen policies, practices and programs. And we want to recognize the excellent work that researchers are doing to help us all gather new insights about families who serve.”
To that end, MFRI has created an award to recognize the single scientific article published that combines exceptional rigor with important insights about military and veteran families. Nominations for the award are neither solicited nor accepted. Instead, a panel of 12 reviewers examined all the research on military families published during 2014, more than 150 articles in all. Multiple rounds of review yielded the winning article.
The article will be open for anyone to read online through Oct. 23. Find it in the Wiley Online Library.