The Professional Counselor | Volume 14, Issue 1 85 and support from the service member was essential for spouse resilience (Richer et al., 2022). A study conducted within the communication field also explored spouses’ communicative construction of resilience during deployments. Qualitative data analysis of interviews with 24 spouses indicated how spouses use communication to reconcile their contradictory realities, which increases their resilience (Villagran et al., 2013). This resilience has also been found to be a protective factor against depression and substance abuse during military deployments (Erbes et al., 2017). Finally, a survey study of Army spouses (N = 3,036) determined that spouses who were less resilient were at higher risk for mental health diagnoses (Sullivan et al., 2021). While these studies explored the nature of resilience demonstrated by military spouses, our searches in JSTOR, PubMed, ERIC, PsycINFO, and Google Scholar did not reveal any studies regarding spouses’ perceptions of their own resilience or how they define this resilience for themselves and their community. Our study fills that research gap by exploring active-duty spouses’ perceptions and definitions of resilience. Methods The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore the perceptions of active-duty spouses regarding their resilience. This study was guided by the following research questions: 1) What are military spouses’ perceptions of their own resilience? and 2) How do military spouses define “resilience?” Phenomenology seeks to present a certain phenomenon in its most authentic form (Moustakas, 1994). In order to most authentically and openly describe our participants’ experiences, we chose a qualitative transcendental phenomenological approach to frame our study. This tradition of qualitative research focuses on portraying a genuine representation of the participants’ perceptions and experiences. However, the distinct feature of transcendental phenomenology is its first step, which involves the researchers recognizing and bracketing their biases so they can analyze the data without any interference (Moerer-Urdahl & Creswell, 2004). We selected this design because each of our research team members were military spouses. We therefore recognized the need to mitigate our biases in order to give a true representation of the participants’ perceptions, free from our own preconceived notions. Participants The participants in this study were selected based on their status as active-duty military spouses and their willingness to participate in the study. There were no other inclusion or exclusion criteria for the participants in this study. After gaining IRB approval, we used convenience sampling to recruit eight participants. In qualitative research, convenience sampling is used to recruit participants who are closely accessible to the researchers (Andrade, 2021). Our research team emailed participants that we knew through living, working, and volunteering on military bases throughout the United States and at overseas duty stations who fit the active-duty military spouse criteria for this study and asked them if they were willing to participate in the study. Once the participants expressed interest, they were provided with an information sheet regarding the study’s purpose and the nature of their involvement in the study. Participant demographics are included in Table 1. All of the participants were female and all were between the ages of 30–40. Four branches of the U.S. military, including Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps, were represented in the sample. No reservist, Coast Guard, or Space Force military spouses participated in our study. Five of our participants were White and three were Black. Their tenure as military spouses ranged from 4 years to 17 years. Five of the spouses were married to a military officer, while three of the participants were married to an enlisted service member. After interviewing these eight participants, our research team met and determined that because of the distinct common patterns we found across each of the participants’ transcripts, we had reached saturation and did not need to recruit any additional participants for our study (Saunders et al., 2018).
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