Monitoring Employment Conditions of Military Spouses

Abstract

The RAND Corporation is a nonprofit research organization providing objective analysis and effective solutions that address the challenges facing the public and private sectors around the world. RAND's publications do not necessarily reflect the opinions of its research clients and sponsors.R ® is a registered trademark. © Copyright 2006 RAND CorporationAll rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from RAND. The research described in this report was prepared for the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD). The research was conducted in the RAND National Defense Research Institute, a federally funded research and development center sponsored by the OSD, the Joint Staff, the Unified Combatant Commands, the Department of the Navy, the Marine Corps, the defense agencies, and the defense Intelligence Community under Contract DASW01-01-C-0004. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-PublicationData is available for this publication.ISBN 978-0-8330-3961-3iii PrefaceDecisions to enlist and especially to remain in the military are often not made alone. Most of the 1.4 million active-duty members are married, and they must consider the interests of their spouses when deciding whether or not to remain in the military. Spouses, in turn, will be influenced by their own civilian opportunities as circumscribed by the members' military life. Most spouses of active-duty personnel are active in the labor market (i.e., employed or seeking work). This status means civilian employment opportunities will affect how members view military life and how willing they are to continue committing their families to military life. The issues of military spouses in the labor market are therefore critical ones for retention of military members. As part of the continuing research on the quality of life of military families, the RAND Corporation was asked to explore how to optimally use current data sources to monitor employment conditions of military spouses, and to determine if additional data sources are necessary. This document presents our research on developing employment statistics for military spouses.

Measuring Underemployment Among Military Spouses

“…One of the many aspects of military family quality of life that DoD seeks to monitor and improve is the degree of employment opportunity available to spouses of military members (whom we refer to as military spouses). In advising DoD on how best to measure underemployment among military spouses, we argued in previous work (Lim and Golinelli, 2006) that the Labor Utilization Framework (LUF) is superior to traditional Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) measures of underemployment, such as the unemployment rate. In that work, we also proposed a set of additional survey questions that would provide enough information to construct the LUF measures of underemployment.…”

“…To fully support military wives' efforts to gain adequate employment and to evaluate the effectiveness of its policies, DoD needs to measure military wives' labor market conditions and monitor the changes. To assist DoD with this effort, RAND published a report (Lim and Golinelli, 2006) that reviewed different measures of employment conditions. The authors identified the employment measures set forth in the Labor Utilization Framework (LUF) (see Hauser, 1974) as the most suitable for capturing military spouses' labor market position and behavior.…”

“…The final military dataset for this analysis consisted of 10,251 military wives who were between the ages of 16 and 65 at the time of the survey. Lim and Golinelli (2006) reviewed possible measures of military spouse labor utilization and concluded that traditional Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) measures were insufficient to capture the degree of underemployment among military spouses. They recommended that DoD use the Labor Utilization Framework (LUF) to monitor military spouse employment.…”

“…As a result, the unemployment rate is incomplete and can be misleading as an overall indicator of the population's employment conditions. Lim and Golinelli (2006) reviewed all BLS employment measures, including the unemployment rate, and concluded that DoD needed to go beyond traditional BLS measures (e.g., job versus no job) to fully monitor the problems that military wives may experience in the labor market. They argued that the standard measures neither recognize subtle differences among jobless individuals nor capture important differences among individuals with jobs.…”

“…The LUF has evolved since 1974, but its main purpose remains to capture work time lost, income deficiency, and the mismatch of workers' skill attainment with required job skills (Clogg, Eliason, and Leicht, 2001). For military wives, Lim and Golinelli (2006) recommended that DoD use measures that captured (1) a person's labor force behavior throughout the previous year and (2) a person's labor-force position. 1…”