| Abstract [eng] |
From the middle of the 20th century stress and its influence to task accomplishment became one of the mostly analyzed and researched spheres in armed forces. Scientists working in military pay big attention to this sphere because wrong decision of one soldier can cause huge losses of material and human resources (Driskell, Salas, 1991; Sinclair, Tucker, 2006; Greenberg, 2007; Adler, et. al., 2008; Dolan, Ender, 2008; Morelli, Burton, 2009). During the last decade women very actively were joining military in all over the world and number of women in armed forces increased to times (Carreiras, 2008; Kummel, Carreiras, 2008). That directly affected the growth of gender topicality in armed forces (Myers, Kedney, 2003; Raisborough, 2007). If differentiate soldiers by gender it would be possible to create effective ways of psychological assistance and stress prevention for serving soldiers. Comparison of men and women experienced stress, stress factors and coping methods in Lithuanian armed forces would help to show importance of possible specific psychological problems of these two groups. So in this work men and women that serve in Lithuanian armed forces were analyzed how they experience stress and what coping methods they usually use. Research participants – 140 soldiers: 43 women and 97 men serving in three different motorized infantry battalions of the brigade of “Iron Wolf”. Two methodologies were used in this research. One methodology was created in this work in order to evaluate experienced stress of professional soldiers. Second one that was used is coping with stress questionnaire (Grakauskas, Valickas, 2006). Data is analyzed using factor analysis with varimax, Mann-Whitney criteria for independent samples and Pearson correlation coefficient. In this work estimations were done that women serving in Lithuanian armed forces experience lower level stress in comparison with serving men. Serving men experience stronger stress because of training conditions, behavior of their commanders and social guaranties. Men and women in Lithuanian armed forces experience similar stress when they face such factors like their family relationship or disrespect in duty. Besides there is finding that women in Lithuanian armed forces in order to cope with stress more often use emotional discharge. But use of social assistance and avoiding as stress coping methods are in very similar level among Lithuanian soldiers and no matter is this men or woman. |
