Moral Distress Among Long-Term Care Social Workers

Abstract

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.