It is widely recognized that, along with physical and psychological injuries, war profoundly affects veterans spiritually and morally. However, research about the link between combat and changes in morality and spirituality is lacking. Moral injury is a construct that we have proposed to describe disruption in an individual's sense of personal morality and capacity to behave in a just manner. As a first step in construct validation, we asked a diverse group of health and religious professionals with many years of service to active duty warriors and veterans to provide commentary about moral injury. Respondents were given a semistructured interview and their responses were sorted. The transcripts were used to clarify the range of potentially and morally injurious experiences in war and the lasting sequelae of these experiences. There was strong support for the usefulness of the moral injury concept; however, respondents chiefly found our working definition to be inadequate.
Military service can confront service members with experiences that undermine their core sense of humanity and violate global values and beliefs. These types of experiences increase the risk for posttraumatic maladjustment in this population, even when accounting for rates of exposure to life threat traumas. Moral injury is an emerging construct to more fully capture the many possible psychological, ethical, and spiritual/existential challenges among persons who served in modern wars and other trauma-exposed professional groups. There is currently a need for psychometrically sound instrumentation for assessing morally injurious experiences (MIEs). The Moral Injury Questionnaire - Military Version (MIQ-M) was developed to provide a tool for assessing possible MIEs among military populations. This study provides preliminary evidence of the validity - including factorial, concurrent, and incremental - and clinical utility of the MIQ-M for further applications in clinical and research contexts.
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