Electronic support for psychological well-being of military staff: primary data analysis

Abstract

Background and purpose.The study is aimed to clarify the specifics of receiving electronic support by Ukrainian militaries to increase their psychological well-being. The main methodological constructs used in the work are psychological well-being, online behavior, socio-psychological support, social identification. The study was organized on the Google-Forms base, data collection lasted from May to September 2020. Descriptive statistics were used to analyze the data. The sample consisted of 86 militaries, mostly men, average age of 35, the majority are citizens living in full families, having an average monthly income of UAH 16,000-18,000. According to the construct of psychological well-being, the respondents showed quite high indicators (on average, more than 83% of positive statements).

Findings.The most uttered components: competence and ability to perform important activities, and an optimistic view of the future (88% of positive answers); the least uttered – a sense of support and reward from existing social relationships (77%). The activity of online behavior for receiving e-psychological support was quite low: most respondents use e-means to receive support very rarely (almost 70%) and this can usually take no more than 10 minutes (almost 55% of responses) and up to 30 minutes (almost 20%) for whole months. Most often, among the listed electronic means, military staff choose to simply enter a query in Google search, and then choose the option of support from the results (over 60%), less often – use communities on social networks (17%), selected sites/ forums (14%), groups in messengers such as Viber, Telegram (13%). Among the mentioned web resources, to which the interviewed servicemen turn for psychosocial support, are bezbroni.net; veteranhub.com.ua; dovidnykmpz.info. Receiving socio-psychological support online, most respondents focus on its information component, mostly just reading information (77%) or asking questions (8%). Due to electronic means, militaries are more often getting the ideas they really needed (36% of positive answers), the good advice on how to overcome the crisis (34%), find solutions to their problems (33%), but much less often – are able to share intimate information about themselves (13%). Accordingly, the indicators of social identification of servicemen with their electronic support communities are low (on average, only 13% of positive responses).

Practical applications of the results. The results require further multidimensional analysis to determine the nature of the relationship between variables and to make recommendations for the use of electronic means to support the psychological well-being of Ukrainian military staff.