The Moral Distress Instrument (MDI): Development, Validation and Associations with Burnout among Finnish Social Workers
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Moral distress (MD), the suffering experienced by professionals due to their restricted moral agency, has become a popular subject of study in the fields of social work and health care.Many of the existing measures of MD are targeted at certain professionals, such as health care workers, and are thus restricted to such contexts.This has challenged the conceptual development and empirical examination of MD as a phenomenon occurring across diverse professional groups in different work settings.This study introduces a general measure of MD, the Moral Distress Instrument (MDI).It is not bound to specific professional contexts, and it aims to enable comparative and cross-disciplinary analyses of MD.The MDI consists of seven items that capture different forms of constrained moral agency and follow-up items measuring the level of distress related to these experiences.The reliability and validity of the MDI is investigated, and its distinctiveness from and associations with burnout are studied among a sample of Finnish social workers (n = 367).The MDI was shown to be a reliable and valid measure among the sample.The measures of MD and burnout were shown to tap separate constructs, although these experiences were strongly associated with each other.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".