"Psychological Well-Being and Resilience Assessment of Brazilian Navy Military Personnel During a Long- Term Mission"

Abstract

Several aspects of military service can generate a psychosocial burden for personnel and their families that can contribute to increased stress and tension in daily routine. This can be even more aggravated when it comes to military personnel who carry out long-term missions, period which they spend a long time in stressful and risky situations, distanced from their families and more vulnerable to environmental conditions. This work aimed to evaluate subjective well-being and resilience, as well as verify the correlation between these two constructs in a sample of Brazilian Navy soldiers (male healthy adults, aged between 23 and 53 years) during an operational mission, from March to December 2020, aboard the "Independence" Frigate, a ship that was part of the Peacekeeping Forces in the Maritime Task Force of the UNIFIL. It´s the first time that military personnel psychological parameters on board a Brazilian war ship have been evaluated. This study verified that there was no change in the general result and in each PWBS subdomain before and after the mission, which indicates that, for these participants, subjective well-being was not influenced by the operational mission carried out. Despite being on a long-term mission and, therefore, with the possibility of greater psychological vulnerability and stress, the participants showed good levels of well-being and life satisfaction. Positive associations were observed between all six PWB subscales and CD-RISC dimensions, thus, those military personnel with a higher level of subjective well-being also have better resilience indices.