Table 2.
Measures of Veteran risk and protective factors
| Construct | Measure | Scoring | α |
|---|---|---|---|
| Personality | |||
| Grit | Short Grit Scale (Duckworth & Quinn, 2009) | 5-point Likert scale of “Very much like me” to “Not like me at all” | 0.78 |
| Mindfulness | 3 items from the Mindful Attention Awareness Scale (Brown & Ryan, 2003; Osman et al., 2016) | 6-point Likert scale of “Almost always” to “Almost never” | 0.90 |
| Resilience | 10-item Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale (Campbell‐Sills & Stein, 2007) | 5-point Likert scale of “Not at all true” to “Truly nearly all the time” | 0.90 |
| Impulsiveness | Barratt Impulsiveness Scale-Brief (Steinberg, Sharp, Stanford, & Tharp, 2013) | ||
| Hostility |
Brief Symptom Inventory-18, Hostility Subscale (Derogatis & Melisaratos, 1983) |
5-point Likert scale of “Not at all” to “Extremely” |
0.90 |
| Adverse Childhood Experiences |
Adverse Childhood Experiences Questionnaire (Felitti et al., 1998) |
Dichotomous items summed for total score |
0.76 |
| Military-Specific Experiences | |||
| Perceived Effect of Military Experience | “How has being in the military affected your life?” (Isaacs et al., 2017) | 7-point Likert scale of “Strong negative effect” to “Strong positive effect” | N/A |
| Military Sexual Assault | “When you were in the military, did you ever receive unwanted, threatening, or repeated sexual attention (for example, touching, cornering, pressure for sexual favors, or inappropriate verbal remarks, etc.)?” and “When you were in the military, did you have sexual contact against your will or when you were unable to say no (for example, after being forced or threatened or to avoid other consequences)?” (McIntyre et al., 1999) | Dichotomous responding; summed for total score | 0.63 |
| Moral Injurya |
Moral Injury Event Scale (MIES; Nash et al., 2013) |
7-point Likert scale of “Strongly disagree” to “Strongly agree” |
0.90 |
| Post-Military Experiences | |||
| Community Integration | “I feel well integrated in my community (e.g., regularly participate in community activities)” | 8-point Likert scale of “Strongly Disagree” to “Strongly Agree” | N/A |
| Social Support Received | Medical Outcomes Study Social Support Survey, “Social Support Received” subscale (Sherbourne & Stewart, 1991) | 5-point Likert scale of “None of the time” to “All of the time” | 0.89 |
| Psychosocial Functioning Difficulties | Brief Inventory of Psychosocial Functioning (Marx et al., 2019) | 7-point Likert scale of “Never” to “Always” | 0.85 |
aOnly administered to Veterans reporting combat exposure, n = 1,420.