“He’s never been the same”

Her lived experience growing up in a military family is shaping and informing important academic research MSVU graduate student Kathryn Reeves is carrying out with military and Veteran families.

"I did my undergraduate degree at MSVU, and I really loved the community and the ability I had to work closely with professors who were doing really incredible work," she says. "I started working with Dr. Catherine Baillie Abidi in MSVU's Child and Youth Study Department and studying moral injury. That led me to being curious about how children might experience moral injury in a parent, especially because I come from a family where my father served [in the military], my grandparents served, and my siblings served. It occurred to me that no one had ever asked me what it was like as a child growing up, so I saw a gap in the literature."

Moral injury is defined as a specific kind of trauma that occurs when a person's core principles or moral beliefs are violated. Through perpetrating, failing to prevent, witnessing, or betrayal by those in power, a moral injury may result in distressing psychological, behavioural, social, and/or spiritual outcomes. Thought to affect millions of people across a range of professions, military service has unique constellations of potentially morally injurious events to which members and their families may be exposed.

Studying Intergenerational Impacts of Military Service-Related Moral Injury

Having graduated from MSVU with a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology (Honours) during the spring 2023 convocation, Kathryn is now working toward a Master of Arts in Family Studies and Gerontology and is currently completing her graduate thesis under the supervision of professor Dr. Deborah Norris. "She really focuses in on military family research, and it just became this lovely, caring matchup of interests that I couldn't resist spending more time with," says Kathryn.

"I decided to look at what I'm calling the Intergenerational Impacts of Military Service-Related Moral Injury," she says. "I will be doing qualitative interviews, ideally with an even balance of Army, Navy and Air Force adult children who grew up with a parent who had a moral injury and asking them about how that moral injury influenced their childhood and what they needed and maybe didn't have, or what worked really well for them that they think people should know about."

Family Inspiration and Connection

Kathryn says her current work is inspired by research she began during her undergraduate degree. Working with the Dallaire Institute for Children, Peace and Security at Dalhousie University, she helped investigate how moral injury might be influenced by encountering children during combat. And, with a military family thread running through her studies, it's apt that Kathryn's father helped make her initial connection with that organization.

"My dad is a Veteran of the Canadian Armed Forces. He deployed to Afghanistan a number of times, and when he was going through his release in retirement from the Armed Forces, he wanted to do something meaningful and give back," she says. "So, he worked with the Dallaire Institute at their beginning and, when I was going into research and looking where my interests may lie, my dad was lovingly and very helpfully able to connect me to them as a possible group that I might be able to work with."

She says what she heard during the conversations she had during her work with the Institute came together with her personal experience to validate her perspective and shape what has been her research focus ever since.

"I was told by the Veterans, and I knew through my own experience, that military service extends beyond the serving member to their families," she says. "I really wanted to focus in on and bring light to that. I was very lucky that I had a supervisor who allowed me to do that primary research. I sought my own interviews, I collected all the qualitative data, and I was able to recruit children whose parents had been deployed to potentially injurious missions. And then I was one of the few people I know who was able to publish my [undergraduate] honours research afterwards."

Children's perception of moral injury in parents post military deployment

Kathryn's undergraduate honours thesis - "He's never been the same": Children's perception of moral injury in parents post military deployment - was published in the Journal of Military, Veteran, and Family Health. She is also co-author on five peer-reviewed conference presentations and one sole author presentation, and a co-author on five peer-reviewed publications. Her work to date has created the foundation for her graduate studies.

"My master's thesis focus was really inspired by my undergraduate thesis, where some of my participants reflected to me that the impact it had on them was really intergenerational, and it extended into their lives in a way that was really nuanced, and that they wish there were more people asking about those kind of deep, nuanced moments of how they saw it and how it influenced them," she says.

Kathryn says she intends to create policy recommendations, infographics and documents she can present alongside her research. She plans to ask her research participants to serve as peer evaluators, going through her graduate work and validating that the data is presented as they want it to be. She adds that reflecting diverse perspectives throughout her research is one of her core objectives.

"I'm trying to be very inclusive and really consciously recruit people who have not been recruited before," she says. "One of the things that's really important to me is that moral injury has really been looked at from a combat-specific perspective. We have really left out the way that moral injury can manifest on Canadian soil through things like military sexual assault or the experience of Indigenous people within the Armed Forces and how there might be moral injury in those scenarios. I am planning to facilitate connections with those groups and get their input so that it is more significantly represented than it is currently."

First East Coast Recipient of the Royal Canadian Legion Masters Scholarship

Kathryn's work has received significant recognition and support. She is the first person on the East Coast to receive the Royal Canadian Legion Masters Scholarship, offered by the Royal Canadian Legion and presented in partnership with the Canadian Institute for Military and Veteran Health Research. Awarded to one student every year, the scholarship provides $30,000 over 24 months to support military and Veteran family health research.

"The financial side is really nice because it allows me to do my work in a focused way, but even more for me is the knowledge that a group of Veterans on that board read my research proposal and thought that it was worth funding and saw it as something that was important to them as well," she says. "It was very validating for me to know that it matters to people who have lived the experience I'm trying to explore."

Kathryn has also received a Research Nova Scotia Master's Award, a Nova Scotia Research and Innovation Award, a CN Summer Internship, an MSVU entrance scholarship, graduate assistantships, and a TMC Network research scholarship. She completed her undergraduate degree at MSVU with the highest aggregate and the Senate Award of Distinction. She anticipates completing her current research and degree in time for the spring 2025 convocation and then intends to continue to doctoral studies.

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