Award Date

May 2024

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Department

Criminal Justice

First Committee Member

Margaret Alexis Kennedy

Second Committee Member

Emily Troshynski

Third Committee Member

Alexandra Slemaker

Fourth Committee Member

Kimberly Barchard

Number of Pages

106

Abstract

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.

Keywords

moral distress; moral injury; post-traumatic stress disorder; trauma

Disciplines

Criminology | Criminology and Criminal Justice | Psychology

Degree Grantor

University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Language

English

Rights

IN COPYRIGHT. For more information about this rights statement, please visit http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

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