The Moral Injury Assessment for Public Safety Personnel: A Psychometric Investigation Among Canadian Police Officers

Given the requirement for split-second decision making in unpredictable and morally ambiguous situations while in the line of duty, there is growing recognition that police officers are uniquely at risk for experiencing moral injury (MI). There is a need for valid and reliable assessment tools of MI within police populations to extend research initially conducted in or within the military context. The Moral Injury Assessment for Public Safety Personnel (MIA-PSP) is a population-specific measure developed to assess MI across police officers, firefighters, paramedics, correctional officers, and 911 dispatchers. Initial exploratory validation work by Roth et al. (2023) identified a three-factor structure capturing Emotional Sequelae, Perpetrations, and Betrayals. The structure of the MIA-PSP has yet to be validated using confirmatory modeling. The present study sought to investigate the psychometric properties of the MIA-PSP in a sample of police officers (N = 367, Mdn = 20 years of service, 72.5% men). We examined measurement invariance across gender and years of service, as well as the concurrent validity of the proposed factors with measures of traumatic stress, trauma-related outcomes, and well-being. Confirmatory factor analysis modeling supported a correlated three-factor structure that was invariant across gender and years of service. Controlling for shared variance among the subscales, the Emotional Sequelae and Betrayals subscales demonstrated unique predictive power with measures of trauma, trauma-related outcomes, and well-being. Findings suggest the MIA-PSP is a promising scale to assess MI within police populations.