Moral Distress Among Long-Term Care Social Workers

Objective:To describe the quantitative validation of a unique questionnaire to measure moral distress among social workers in long-term care facilities in Israel.Method:Overall, 216 long-term care facilities’ social workers took part in the pilot study that included psychometric evaluation and const...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inResearch on social work practice Vol. 28; no. 5; pp. 628 - 637
Main Authors Lev Sagit, Ayalon Liat
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Thousand Oaks SAGE PUBLICATIONS, INC 01.07.2018
Subjects
Ethics
Exploratory factor analysis
Long term health care
Long term hospitals
Measures
Morality
Pilot projects
Professional ethics
Psychological distress
Quantitative psychology
Questionnaires
Reliability
Research ethics
Social workers
Validity
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Summary:Objective:To describe the quantitative validation of a unique questionnaire to measure moral distress among social workers in long-term care facilities in Israel.Method:Overall, 216 long-term care facilities’ social workers took part in the pilot study that included psychometric evaluation and construct validation. Moral distress was examined by two scales, measuring the frequency and the intensity of morally loaded events. A third scale was created, representing the product of the frequency and intensity scores for each item separately.Results:Two items with high floor effect were removed. The internal reliability of each of the three Moral Distress Scales was .92. An exploratory factor analysis suggested a single-factor solution. The construct validity was approved. In its final version, the questionnaire consisted of 15 items.Conclusions:We believe that the questionnaire can contribute by broadening and deepening ethics discourse and research with regard to social workers’ moral conflicts and moral distress.
ISSN:1049-7315
1552-7581
DOI:10.1177/1049731516672070