Understanding the experience essence of serving soldiers with higher education, phenomenological research

According to the public military service law of I.R.I., military service is a legal obligation to all Iranian male citizens. While military service is an important transitional event which affects various dimensions of soldiers’ life, little research has been done about the lived experience of soldiers and their perceptions of it. The purpose of this paper is a deep and precise study to better understanding of lived experience of graduate (M.A. and Ph.D.) soldiers about the military service.
Material & Former research about military service is often in two specific areas: study of soldiers’ a. physical and b. psychological issues and their consequences including reasons of suicide, smoking, drugs and alcohol use among them. What is evident from the literature review, no research has been done about understanding of soldiers’ mentalities.
Since recognition of human senses, feelings, attitudes and values is relatively impossible by quantitative research methods that tend to objectivism and reductionism, qualitative research methods are used in these cases.
The paper, achieving its goal, has applied phenomenological research approach. Phenomenology helps researcher understand phenomena as it experienced. To this goal, eight ex-soldier people with M.A. degrees and four ex-soldier people with Ph.D. degrees were interviewed and collected data was analyzed with Van-Mannen thematic analytical approach. Purposive sampling was used to select people who have the proper conditions to provide the desired information.
Validity and reliability of study confirmed by credibility, transferability, dependability and conformability methods.
Discussion of Results & In this study, soldiers’ experiences of military service have presented in four groups: a. comprehensive, b. pre-service, c. service and d. post-service experiences and consists of eleven major themes and sixteen sub-themes.
A. Comprehensive Experiences
Comprehensive experiences are general and covering. These themes are major and affect not only the service, but also pre-service and post-service periods.
1. According to the traditional approach to power and authority, military forces facts make authority and the mere presence of soldiers -even in its weak state- is authority-making. 2. Military forces as government mirror: Military dependence to regime makes it a double-edged sword that its appropriate action strengthens the foundations of the regime and its wrong action threats it. 3. Contrast with planning and foresight refers to obstacles that compulsory puts on soldiers life career.
B. Pre-service Experiences
Although compulsory apparently starts at a specific time but has some effects on lives of soldiers even before started. 1. The long wait and the loss of opportunities: long wait to compulsory makes lots of social opportunities disappear which need the compulsory license. 2. Law changes and planning refers to opposition of law changes and life planning.
C. Service Experiences
This branch is dedicated to in-service experiences. 1. Macro-planning weakness refers to loss of a comprehensive and holistic plan in military forces to interact soldiers. This loss advantages in soldiers time wasting, weakness in the audience analysis, weakness of teachers, inadequacy of lessons, wasting soldiers’ expertise, weakness in performance feedback and health and nutrition problems. 2. Compulsory is an appropriate context to behavioral abnormalities including negative cycle of self-fulfilling prophecy and conflict. 3. Weakness in observe soldiers’ status includes weakness in respecting to them, soldiers as free human resources who identify military forces and soldiers as a discredited people. 4. Social problems refers to economic, employment and career advancement, scientific, marriage and family preservation problems which compulsory brings to graduate soldiers’ lives. 5. Soft War: New forms of war in new days make it necessary for military forces to attend soft war in soldiers training.
D. Post-service Experience
Freedom and redemption: Almost all of soldiers at the end of compulsory feel Freedom and redemption from a commitment that had unavoidable effects on their lives.