Ethical Considerations in the Recruitment of Military Partners in Combat-Related Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Research

Abstract

The ethical guidelines of the American Psychiatric Association are employed to describe implications for researchers, educators, and administrators. For clinical nurses, the American Nurses Association's initiative to support military families is used to guide our discussion. Nurses are in a leading position to advocate for the ethical recruitment of military partners in PTSD research.

Experiences of Military Spouses of Veterans With Combat‐Related Posttraumatic Stress Disorder

“…A pilot study was conducted to refine the methodological issues (Yambo, Hamilton, & Johnson, ). Participants were recruited through purposive sampling.…”

Healthy Military Families 2020

“…Considering that there are so many military and veteran families, we would expect that clinical research, interventions, and policies including family samples, designs, and outcomes would be plentiful. However, previous researchers have cited multiple challenges in conducting military family research, such as access difficulties related to deployments and frequent changes in geographic locations, additional military regulatory burdens, and lack of sustained federal funding for this research area (Cozza et al, 2018;Hawkins et al, 2017;Yambo et al, 2015). Further, while service members are not federally identified as a vulnerable population, service members' ability to provide voluntary consent in research may feel compromised due to perceived or real coercion within the military hierarchical structure.…”