This paper describes the development and preliminary psychometric properties of the Moral Injury Scales for Youth (MISY). Although to date, the construct of moral injury has been focused on studies of samples of adult military personnel, the MISY was developed to extend the study of moral injury to interpersonal relationship stressors and transgressions among emerging adults, adolescents, and children. Participants in a validation study included 473 undergraduate students (78.6% female, age range: 18–25 years) recruited from a psychology participant pool at a large university in the Western United States as well as a second sample of 185 students recruited from the same pool, to assess reliability. Results of exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) indicated that the MISY demonstrated a five‐factor latent structure with good internal consistencies. Correlational analyses indicated that the MISY subscales demonstrated good convergent validity, divergent validity, and test–retest reliability. The findings suggest that the MISY is a psychometrically reliable and valid measure of moral injury in emerging adults, with utility for examining moral injury in nonmilitary youth populations.

To date, scholars have established associations among nonsuicidal self-injury and sexual abuse, posttraumatic stress symptoms, and dissociation. However, leading theoretical models of the mechanisms underlying the association between trauma and negative outcomes suggest a more parsimonious explanation in that deficits in emotion regulation may underlie these various risk factors for self-injury. This study examined whether sexual abuse was differentially associated with nonsuicidal self-injury over and above other forms of traumatic experiences and whether the association between sexual abuse and self-injury was statistically mediated by emotion dysregulation and dissociation. Participants included 525 youth (392 boys, 133 girls) recruited from the U.S. juvenile justice system who completed measures of self-reported trauma exposure, posttraumatic stress symptoms, dissociation, and emotion dysregulation. Results of a hierarchical regression demonstrated that sexual abuse predicted posttraumatic stress symptoms and self-injury over and above other forms of traumatic experiences. Results of bootstrapped mediation analyses indicated that emotion dysregulation and dissociation in combination were implicated in self-injury among youth. The results suggest that youth in the juvenile justice system who experience sexual abuse may be at risk for higher rates of posttraumatic stress symptoms and that self-injury may be particularly salient for youth who experience sexual abuse. Furthermore, the results shed light on the role that dissociation and emotion dysregulation play in the relation between sexual abuse and self-injury, suggesting that a larger framework of self-regulation may have both empirical and clinical utility in helping to understand the underlying processes at play in these associations.

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These results provide support for the multidimensionality of the construct of posttraumatic dissociation and contribute to the understanding of the dissociative subtype of PTSD among adolescents. (PsycINFO Database Record