Validation of the Soul Injury Self-awareness Inventory

Traumatic lifetime experiences can complicate peaceful dying, causing latent wounds such as posttraumatic stress disorder, moral injury, and soul injury to reemerge at the end of life. Soul injury is defined as an overlooked, unassessed wound that separates a person from his/her own sense of self. The Soul Injury Self-awareness Inventory (Soul Injury Inventory) was developed to identify unresolved losses and hurts that threaten a sense of self. The Soul Injury Inventory is a brief, 10-item instrument that opens the door to meaningful conversations with patients, caregivers, and professionals. This article describes 2 validation studies conducted to measure the reliability, internal consistency, and construct validity of the Soul Injury Inventory. In study 1, the Soul Injury Inventory was demonstrated to be a psychometrically sound tool in which all questions contributed significantly to a single factor characterized as soul injury. In receiver operating characteristic analyses, scores less than 23.5 were shown to be indicative of soul injury with optimal sensitivity and specificity. Study 2 demonstrated that the Soul Injury Inventory has excellent test-retest reliability. The Soul Injury Inventory also has strong internal consistency, as demonstrated in studies 1 and 2. These 2 validation studies, taken together, demonstrate that the Soul Injury Inventory is an excellent, invariant measure of soul injury.