Author: Bridget Milam Major: Nursing
Over the course of the 2019 spring grant term, I worked alongside my honors mentor, Dr. Bart Hammig, building and distributing a survey to record U.S. military veterans’ attitudes and perceptions of mental healthcare. My goal was to attempt to measure any social stigma which could influence veterans’ mental healthcare experience and if this was associated with age, length of service, or military branch. I found this topic very interesting as an aspiring nurse. Knowing this information in a clinical setting could help healthcare professionals better assess a patient’s condition and predict more reliable outcomes.
Dr. Hammig and I both knew little about military terminology, so I went to Erika Gamboa at the Veterans Resource and Information Center on campus. Erika was gracious enough to sit and work with me while I wrote the survey and also distributed the final survey via the center’s emailing list.
The online survey included a general demographics questionnaire following a brief mental health history and mental healthcare experience of the respondent. The end of the survey presented 9 reflective statements where the respondent’s answer on a 5-point scale of “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree” would reflect either positive or negative attitudes towards mental healthcare. Attitudes and perceptions were determined by the inverse relationship of the survey’s statements and the respondent’s answer (given a positive vs. negative statement). A positive statement would reflect a generally positive mindset regarding mental healthcare; for example, “Mental wellness is important to overall well-being” is considered a positive statement because it refers to mental wellness as important. A positive response to this statement would include “strongly agree” or “somewhat agree”. I used this method to analyze the data in response to my research goal. Dr. Hammig helped me get started by showing me how to manipulate the dataset and variables in the Qualtrics software (there was a larger learning curve than I originally anticipated—nonetheless, Dr. Hammig was patient with me).
Within a few weeks of the survey going live in January, multiple responses came in on a volunteer basis. There was a total of 75 responses; 21 responses were excluded from the analysis due to incompletion or failure to pass the consciousness-awareness test question. 54 viable responses remained. We closed the survey in early March, leaving time to analyze the data.
13.6% of respondents agreed with statements which described negative attitudes and perceptions of mental healthcare and 76.4% of respondents agreed with statements which described positive attitudes and perceptions of mental healthcare; 10.1% of respondents were indifferent. No statistically significant correlations were found between the variables presented in the research question.
The most common service-related mental illness diagnoses were depression (37.0%) and anxiety (24.1%) while satisfaction rates for previous metal healthcare experiences were 75% across mental healthcare facilities. Overwhelmingly, 94.4% of respondents believe mental healthcare is important to overall wellbeing and 66.7% disagreed that a servicemember seeking mental healthcare shows weakness.
Unfortunately, the response pool was too low to draw more accurate conclusions regarding the veteran population as a whole. I also quickly learned that it is difficult to accurately measure attitudes and perceptions with a survey due to the fact that people may answer how they think they should rather than how they truly believe. I was also surprised to find there were no correlations with age, length of service, or military branch. If anything, I learned that I will not always get the results I expect.
This Honors College Research Grant allowed me to study a topic I love in an academic setting. I learned how attitudes, perceptions, and beliefs are difficult to measure and that it takes a creative mind to accurately record and analyze these topics. I also learned a great deal of military terminology which I plan to use in my upcoming career as a nurse, hopefully working with veterans at the Veterans Affairs Hospital. This research project serves as the groundwork for new potential discoveries; I am proud to be leaving behind this work for future students to build upon.