Discerning Moral Injury

Moral injury is a recently developed psychological construct used to explain trauma that cannot be adequately explained by post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). It arises from experiences in which sufferers feel that they have violated deeply held moral beliefs and has multiple negative long term health and professional consequences for individuals affected. In order to better understand moral injury, this study seeks to understand how it is identified in individuals by others and utilizes Christie’s (2018) Ideal Victim Theory and Gray and Wegner’s (2009) Moral Typecasting Theory as a theoretical framework. Participants for this study were 374 undergraduate students at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Participants were asked to complete an online questionnaire in order to gauge how they identified moral injury in various contexts and populations. Repeated measures and one-way ANOVAs and a confirmatory factor analysis were used to analyze the data for this sample. Data analysis found that participant identification of moral injury was related by the context, indicators, ACE scores, and the gender presented in the scenarios.