Do adolescents do and feel better when their absent military parents communicate with them from afar and are supportive?

Methods

Summary

Translating questionnaires from English to Hebrew:  The questionnaires were developed by Drs. Sigelman, Friedman and Rohrbeck of the George Washington University in the US.  The work was funded by the university.  There are several conference presentations and one published paper based on the work http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1088.  For the purpose of our planned research in Israel, the questionnaires will be translated to Hebrew.  The initial work will be done by a professional survey company TNS teleseker http://www.tnsglobal.com/offic... Following Peña’s (2007) guidelines, the translation will be validated by the three investigators (who are fluent in both Hebrew and English) to ensure the linguistic equivalence and cultural-linguistic adaptation of the items whenever necessary, and to maintain the linguistic function and cultural equivalence of the English and Hebrew versions of the quetionnaires.

Peña, Elizabeth D. (2007). Lost in translation: Methodological Considerations in Cross Cultural Research. Child Development, 78(4), 1255-1264.

Research participants:  We will contact by email and phone about 800 married professional members of the Israeli Defense Force. Our goal is to recruit 200 families in which the father, mother and adolescent (age 11 to 18) agreed to participate in our study.   The number of participants to be recruited is based on power analysis.  Adult participants will consent to their and their children's participation and the adolescents will provide their assent. 

Data Collection:  The fathers, mothers and adolescents will fill in our online questionnaires.  The mother questionnaire, the father questionnaire and the adolescent questionnaire ask about distance communication, relationships in the family, and the adolescents' functioning.  The three questionnaires differ in terms of demographic, parental health, parental stress, military and work schedule information that are asked.  

Measures: 1.  Demographics (age, gender, ethnicity, education);  2.  Military rank and work schedules; 3.  Family relationships (mother-child, father-child, marital satisfaction; parents' emotional intimacy); 4.  Parental health and stress; 5. Communication at a distance (method, quantity, quality, opportunities and barriers to communication); 6. Adolescent functioning. 

Challenges

The primary challenge is recruitment of research participants.  We expect that thanks to the interest of a well positioned Israeli Defense Force psychiatrist, Dr. Luci Laur, and the extensive contacts of Dr. Meytal (investigator in this study) in the IDF, we will be able to advertise our recruitment effort broadly and to enroll 200 families.  

Pre Analysis Plan

1.  Examine the distribution of the variables of interest, and transform or categorize if not normally distributed.  

2.  Examine patterns of missing data.  If necessary and statistically justified, impute missing data.  

3.  Run descriptive statistics to quantitatively describe the quantity and quality of distance communication as well as adolescent functioning.

4. Run regression analyses to  determine the associations between distance communication and adolescent functioning, after controlling for demographic, military, parental and family characteristics that are known to predict adolescents' functioning.