Examining the marriage experiences of soldiers and their spouses from a social work perspective

The military profession, which has a high biopsychosocial impact, differentiates the lives of military personnel and their close environment. Although there are studies that deal with the difficulties experienced by soldiers and their spouses, there is no study examining the structure of military families and their marriage experiences from a social work point of view. The study created with this starting point aims to reveal how the marriage experiences of soldiers and their spouses are. In the research designed with the qualitative research method, in-depth interviews were conducted with 18 participants, including soldiers and their spouses who are actively performing their military service. The information obtained with the semi-structured interview form was analyzed and interpreted in the light of the literature information by content analysis method. In line with the information obtained as a result of the study, marriage for female military spouses is fear, anxiety, limited job opportunities, excessive responsibility; It is defined as a concept that includes uncertainties arising from trust, friendship and business life for the male partner. When the distribution of roles and responsibilities is examined, it is concluded that there are mostly gender-based spouse perceptions and domestic task distribution in couples. While the female partner is responsible for domestic duties and childcare, the male partner has income-generating, budget-planning, authority roles, and parenting is secondary for male partners. It was concluded that the leisure activities of the couples were limited due to reasons such as duty place, parental responsibility, and that there were activities such as being in social areas and visiting friends in the methods of spending time together. In spousal relationships, they have arguments mainly due to work intensity, business life has negative effects especially on the private life of female soldiers, couples' arguments are verbal arguments, the female partner is silent during the discussion, while the male partner can be irritable and intolerant; It was found that the discussions were resolved by means of ignoring, postponing and speaking. It was concluded that couples need psychosocial support mainly due to professional reasons and past traumatic experiences and that they prefer military service due to reasons such as close environment advice, economic concerns and sense of nationalism. In the studies to be carried out with military families; It is thought that factors such as the distribution of the roles and responsibilities of the male and female partners, the spouse and marriage perceptions of the partners are important topics to be emphasized in order to functionalize the marriages. From this point of view, it has been concluded that military social service and interventions to be carried out multidisciplinarily in this field are a very important need for the development of preventive interventions with awareness for army personnel and their immediate environment. Soldier, soldier's spouse, marriage experiences, social work in the military.