Abstract
Nash WP, Vasterling J, Ewing-Cobbs L, Horn S, Gaskin T, Golden J, Riley WT, Bowles
SV, Favret J, Lester P, Koffman R, Farnsworth LC, Baker DG. Consensus recommendations
for common data elements for operational stress research and surveillance: report
of a federal interagency working group.
Empirical studies and surveillance projects increasingly assess and address potentially
adverse psychological health outcomes from the stress of military operations, but
no standards yet exist for common concept definitions, variable categories, and measures.
This article reports the consensus recommendations of the federal interagency Operational
Stress Working Group for common data elements to be used in future operational stress
research and surveillance with the goal of improving comparability across studies.
Operational stress encompasses more than just combat; it occurs everywhere service
members and their families live and work. Posttraumatic stress is not the only adverse
mental or behavioral health outcome of importance. The Operational Stress Working
Group contends that a primary goal of operational stress research and surveillance
is to promote prevention of adverse mental and behavioral outcomes, especially by
recognizing the preclinical and subclinical states of distress and dysfunction that
portend a risk for failure of role performance or future mental disorders. Recommendations
for data elements are divided into 3 tiers: core, supplemental, and emerging, including
variable domains and specific measures for assessing operational stressor exposures,
stress outcomes, moderating factors, and mediating processes. Attention is drawn to
the emerging construct of stress injury as a generic term for subclinical operational
stress, and to emerging data elements addressing biological, psychological, and spiritual
mediators of risk. Methodologies are needed for identifying preclinical and subclinical
states of distress or dysfunction that are markers of risk for failure of role performance
and future clinical mental disorders, so that targeted prevention interventions can
be developed and evaluated.
Key Words
List of Abbreviations:
DRRI (Deployment Risk and Resilience Inventory), IOM (Institute of Medicine), OEF (Operation Enduring Freedom), OIF (Operation Iraqi Freedom), OSWG (Operational Stress Working Group), PTSD (posttraumatic stress disorder)To read this article in full you will need to make a payment
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© 2010 American Congress of Rehabilitation Medicine. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
