When a Disaster Wounds Moral Beliefs: Development and Preliminary Internal Validation of a Moral Injury Scale for Earthquake Survivors

Moral injury has been studied mainly in military populations; our searches found no instrument for disaster survivors. This study developed the Moral Injury Scale for Disaster Survivors (MIS-DS-19) after the 2023 Kahramanmaraş earthquakes in Türkiye. Items for four components defined in advance (moral guilt and shame, institutional betrayal and injustice, collapse of meaning and values, and self-disruption) were rated by eight experts, examined in cognitive interviews, and piloted (n = 135). In the main study, 812 adult survivors, randomly divided into calibration (n = 408) and validation (n = 404) subsamples, answered 24 items. Five weak items were removed. The four-factor model of the remaining 19 items met conventional fit criteria in the validation subsample (comparative fit index = 0.994), and no violation of scalar invariance was detected across nine background variables. Ordinal alpha was 0.88 for the total and 0.83 to 0.85 for the block scores; 2-week test–retest agreement was poor to moderate, too low to follow short-term change in individuals. Scores were associated with distress, resilience, life satisfaction, and exposure in the expected directions. Because the general factor was comparatively weak, block scores are recommended. The evidence is preliminary, comes from one sample, and supports research use.