That’s a question that an associate professor of psychiatry at Yale will be trying to answer with an empirical study of female military combat veterans. The study will be funded by a $2.2 million grant from the United States Department of Veteran Affairs. More information here.
-Bridget Crawford
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Is anyone else troubled by this?
Apologies. What I meant to say above is:
The description of the study states that “These empirical studies will for the first time investigate speculation that women veterans are more susceptible than men to post-traumatic stress disorder. The premise presupposes that women on average enter the military having had more civilian trauma than men and may suffer trauma at the hands of their comrades more than male veterans.”
Is the point of the research to challenge/investigate this premise? Or, if the results do indicate that women are more susceptible to PTSD than men, will the researchers simply assume that this is because they entered the military having experienced more civilian trauma? Presumably they’ll ask participants about their “pre-enlistment trauma,” but I think it’s reasonably to assume that any question that asks about histories of trauma already has a built in gender bias that will undermine any attempt to challenge this premise…