Soldiers and their families in the Slovak Republic: a report on quality of functioning from the empirical perspective

Abstract

The article presents the problems that military families face nowadays, since the Slovak Armed Forces became fully professional. I provide a brief definition of the professional soldier’s family (military family) and its structure, and then introduce the problems that the Slovak Armed Forces have to solve in order to eliminate two sources of stress.<br /> The first source is the impact of the professional soldiers’ job on their families and on the fulfilment of basic family roles. The second source of stress is the impact of the families on the fulfilment of soldiers’ duties at work. These two phenomena present in the Slovak Armed Forces were measured with a questionnaire distributed among 416 respondents. Its results confirmed that the impact of the soldiers’ profession on fulfilment of their basic family roles and the impact of the military family on soldiers’ performance at work (especially their mobility and career) raise serious problems that military families need to face.<br /> I conclude by emphasizing that these problems can be eliminated with the help of a high-quality and complex system of social security for professional soldiers and their families, which could be implemented through social work in the armed forces and built alongside the development of the professional armed forces.