A Propensity Score Approach to Military and Non-Military Mental Health and Offending

• In Event: Special Populations of Offenders with Mental Illness

Abstract

There is an abundance of literature examining the effects of military service on mental health and offending. However, many of these studies compare military members to general population samples, thus ignoring the possibility of a selection effect in regards to military enlistment, which may render civilian and military samples fundamentally different. The current paper adds to this literature by using propensity score models to examine the effect of military service on various mental health and offending outcomes. The use of propensity score models allows us to parse out whether differences between military members and non-military members, are due to the unique stresses of military service or to pre-existing differences between the groups. Data comes from waves 1 and 4 of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health. Approximately 1,100 of the 16,000 participants in the study served in the military or were serving at the time of the wave 4 interview, allowing us to compare those enlisted to those who were not.

Author

• Brittany Jaecques, University of Missouri - St. Louis