Military Spouses’ Lived Experiences in Remote Assignments Overseas: A Heuristic Study

The heuristic study explored the lived experiences of military spouses accompanying service members on remote assignments overseas. Relatively little was understood about geographically remote assignments from U.S. military installations overseas. Numerous studies have investigated military spouses’ experience transitioning from military to civilian life, geographically remote location challenges within the United States, and culture shock related to overseas military installations, independently. To date, research on military spouses transitioning to nonmilitary communities in remote assignments overseas with their active duty service members is lacking. The qualitative heuristic phenomenological design implemented semi-structured open-ended interviews, a focus group, and reflective questionnaires for data collection. The researcher and ten co-researchers were U.S. Air Force, Army, or Navy active duty military spouses with lived experiences in remote assignments within select NATO European host countries. In conjunction with the heuristic analysis, NVivo was implemented to analyze the data collected. Two expert reviewers assisted with theme development and assessment, while the researcher contributed with a heuristic perspective. Three forms of data collection strategies, interviews, focus groups, and reflective questionnaires, and three groups of participants, the researcher, the co-researchers, and the expert reviewers, preserved reflexivity and triangulation in the study. A summary of findings confirmed the need for more empirical knowledge on the phenomenon; theoretical implications suggested military resiliency studies and practical implications highlighted co-researcher recommendations. Delimitations and limitations were acknowledged with recommendations for future research.