State of the Evidence: What We Know, What We Don't, and Why This Research Is Needed

Document Status

Published, v1.0, 31 August 2026, ahead of any white paper or parliamentary briefing. Built from a full audit of the Master Evidence Repository conducted 30 August 2026, cross-checked against Drive-wide search, the Master Filing Registry, and the AURIS Global Research Lead Pipeline. This document does not claim the evidence base is complete. It states plainly what is solid, what is not, and where the real gaps sit, because that honesty is what makes the repository usable for a parliamentary audience, not a liability to hide from one.

1. Why This Research Is Needed

The UK's official measure of successful military transition is whether someone has a job six months after leaving. By that measure, things look fine, most leavers are employed. But a person can have a job, a home, and still feel like they never really landed. Identity and employment are not the same thing, and almost every existing support service is built around employment.

AURIS exists to work on the part nobody else is working on.

This is not an assertion made without checking. Tonight's audit located and verified a real, decade-long piece of external evidence that speaks directly to this: a longitudinal Swedish study following 19 service members for over ten years found that military identity does not fade after service, if anything it persists or strengthens, precisely because nothing in civilian life replaces what service built. That is now a GREEN-tier, independently verified source in this repository, not a claim taken on faith.

2. What Is Genuinely Solid Right Now

Each entry below reads: evidence, what it establishes, status.

• Grimell, 10-year Swedish longitudinal study (19 veterans). Military identity persists after service rather than fading, directly supporting AURIS's founding premise. GREEN, verified 30 Aug 2026.
• Clance & Imes (1978). Founding definition of impostor phenomenon, the mechanism behind the credentialing-variant pattern seen repeatedly in the interview dataset. GREEN, verified 30 Aug 2026.
• Nichter et al., National Health and Resilience in Veterans Study (n=4,069). Childhood adversity predicts differential mental health outcomes in veterans, supporting the distinction between transition-only and complex-trauma cases. GREEN, verified 30 Aug 2026.
• Scoping review, Behavioral Sciences journal (2026). Closest external academic match yet found to AURIS's own Identity, Community, Purpose, Stability sequence. GREEN, verified 30 Aug 2026.
• Wakefield et al. (2024), British Journal of Social Psychology. Applies a validated identity change model (SIMIC) to veteran transition with real mixed-methods data. GREEN, verified 30 Aug 2026.
• LeBon et al. (2025), Stoic Attitudes and Behaviours Scale. First validated instrument for lived Stoic practice, distinguishes real Stoicism from stiff-upper-lip suppression. GREEN, read in full.
• King (2025), Royal Holloway RCT on Stoic training. Real randomised controlled trial with genuine clinical improvement figures. AMBER, full thesis embargoed to Nov 2027, abstract fully extracted.
• 32 to 34 coded interviews, Identity After the Uniform. Own primary qualitative data across military, police, fire and NHS populations. GREEN, own primary data, denominator against 108 planned must always travel with any claim.

3. What Is Real But Not Yet Fully Verified

Eight sources are genuinely located and described, with real titles, real authors, and a real fit to AURIS's argument, but have not yet had a full primary-text read, only a search-level description. This includes the British Journal of Nursing impostor phenomenon study, the Hunter Model for veteran credentialing, the NLP evidence reviews, and three further scoping reviews on belonging and identity disruption. Each is genuinely useful and none should be treated as equivalent to the GREEN sources above until someone reads the actual paper, not the abstract.

4. What Was Checked and Found Wanting

One statistic, the claim that veterans are 2.5 times more likely to die by suicide in their first year after leaving service, was actively checked tonight and could not be traced past a secondary, practitioner-facing source. Despite repeated attempts, no primary study behind that number has been located. It has been downgraded to RED and flagged explicitly: do not cite this figure externally under any circumstances until a primary source is found. This is exactly the kind of statistic that would be most damaging to use incorrectly in a parliamentary setting, compelling, emotionally resonant, and currently unverifiable.

5. What Remains Genuinely Open

These are not failures of the research programme. They are the honest, current edge of it, and naming them plainly is what allows AURIS to say, credibly, that its evidence base is disciplined rather than assumed.

• Official CTP/MOD transition and employment statistics, still not sourced to an admissible primary document.
• Miguel Ingle's doctoral work on veteran career transition coaching, referenced but not located.
• Two sources currently resting on media reporting only (ambulance control room attrition, GMC burnout survey data) rather than the primary reports themselves.
• A 2024 UK veteran partner study, n=37, referenced but the exact source not yet confirmed.
• 93 named academics identified through outreach this month whose specific published research has not yet been extracted into this repository at all, now logged as search targets, not evidence.

6. The Case for the Framework, Stated Plainly

Put together, what is now genuinely verified supports a specific, narrower claim than 'AURIS works', and that narrower claim is itself strong: identity disruption at the point of role transition is real, documented over a full decade in an independent population, distinct from employment outcomes, distinct from clinical pathology in most cases, and currently unaddressed by the systems built to measure transition success. AURIS's own emerging interview data, 32 to 34 of 108 coded, sits inside that same pattern, not as proof, but as a live, growing test of it. The gaps documented here are exactly where the next phase of work should go, not evidence the foundation is weak.

Version History

v0.1, 30 August 2026. First version, built from the full repository audit and batch verification pass completed this session. Author: Gemma Gardner.

v1.0, 31 August 2026. First published version. Content unchanged from v0.1: the audit findings, statuses, numbers and limitations stand as recorded. Author: Gemma Gardner.

© 2026 Gemma Gardner. AURIS Identity System, Identity Performance Psychology and the Identity After the Uniform research programme are the intellectual property of Gemma Gardner. Internal Controlled Document. Coaching, not therapy.

AURIS-RES-093 | v1.0 | Published | Author: Gemma Gardner