Costs and Benefits of Reserve Participation

Recent greater reliance on reserve forces has made it important to understand how reserve mobilizations affect the attitudes, perceptions, and behaviors of reservists, their families, and their civilian employers. The report examines these issues in two ways. First, it compares survey data collected from reservists in 1986 and 1992; second, it compares the responses from mobilized and nonmobilized reservists who were questioned in the 1992 survey. Understanding how mobilizations affect reservists is important for several reasons, especially because mobilizations might change reservists' attitudes about reserve service in significant ways, eventually affecting retention and recruiting in future years.