Evaluating the Army’s Exceptional Family Member Program

Abstract Information: family members who have special medical or educational needs. The EFMP integrates multiple components led by different organizations within the Army. For example, the Human Resources Command coordinates duty assignments for EFMP-enrolled Soldiers to ensure they live in locations that have the necessary services for their family member. Another component of EFMP is support services, which aims to assist with identifying and accessing community resources and services. EFMP support staff provide information and referral services, develop service plans, and facilitate non-clinical case management for EFMP families.
This evaluation provides evidence about Soldiers’ experiences with support staff and their perceptions of accessibility and satisfaction with services. We pose three evaluation questions (EQs):
EQ1: How accessible do Soldiers perceive support services to be?
EQ2: Do any Soldier characteristics (e.g., age, rank) play a role in their perception of support service accessibility?
EQ3: Do Soldiers who report greater accessibility also report more satisfaction with support services?
For this evaluation, data were collected in partnership with a larger cross-service effort by DoD Office of Military Community and Family Policy (MC&FP) across services via an online survey about EFMP experiences and satisfaction. MC&FP collected contact information for EFMP-enrolled service members from each service and invited each member to participate by email. Announcements were also widely shared through newsletters, socials media, and command communications., Current EFMP-enrolled Active Duty Army Soldiers answered an additional subset of questions created for this analysis..
The survey was open November, 2022, through March, 2023, and included a variety of items about service members’ EFMP experiences with enrollment, medical care, educational services, assignment coordination, support staff, and support during PCS moves. All procedures and materials received appropriate Human Research Protections and Information Collections review and approval. To date, over 10,000 Service members from all branches have completed the survey. Responses from participants affiliated with the Army (approximately 40% of the total sample) will be used in analyses for this evaluation.
The survey closed March 15, 2023, so analyses have not yet been conducted. Once data collection has ended, we will begin analysis. Descriptive analyses will provide evidence to answer EQ1 and demonstrate how accessible Soldiers perceive support services to be. This will include frequency counts, measures of central tendency (e.g., mean, mode), and patterns in the data. The project team will then conduct a series of analyses of variance (ANOVAs) to answer EQ2. In the ANOVAs, we will compare reports of accessibility between demographic groups, including rank (i.e., junior enlisted, senior enlisted, junior officer, senior officer), age, gender, and age of family member enrolled in EFMP. Next, correlation and regression analyses will examine EQ3 and show if there is a relationship between perceptions of accessibility and satisfaction with support services.

Relevance Statement: The EFMP is a vital program that has received extensive public, Congressional, and Army leadership attention over the last several years because of its importance to ensuring military families receive the highest level of care. This evaluation effort is a critical step toward providing evidence about the program and informing leaders who have become increasingly interested in demonstrating the impact of Army EFMP on Soldiers and their families.
Further, providing evaluation evidence about Soldiers’ experiences with EFMP support services can inform policy and program decisions to ensure that family needs are being met. This data, and the recommendations that result, will support program stakeholders and implementation staff in understanding how to improve the outcomes of EFMP participants. Findings can enhance decision support and program optimization efforts toward ensuring support services are providing beneficial support to families. Our results will point to possible areas of improvement and strategies to leverage successes in Army EFMP support services. Along with this, ensuring that EFMP support services are adequately accessible and satisfactory can ease Soldiers’ concerns about their Families, thus improving their own performance and resilience – as well as that of their families.
Beyond the impact of this work for military leaders, program staff, and Soldiers, this work serves as an example of evaluation in the military context and provides valuable insights to evaluators across fields. This presentation will share information about the cultural considerations of an important intersection: military families and families with special needs. This evaluation represents an effort to understand the perspectives and experiences of these families and reflect those perspectives and experiences to the Army in order to help improve the EFMP program and policies. Further, we will share examples of the requirements of evaluation and data collection within the military context (e.g., coordinating across agencies, government approval process). In this way, the presentation serves to share the evaluation results, illustrate the challenges of balancing client and participant needs, and also serve as an example of conducting evaluation in this unique context.