Investigation of Psychological Trauma in Journalists and the Development of the Toronto Moral Injury Scale for Journalists
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Journalists fulfill an important civic function by keeping society informed of events that can have a direct impact on their citizens' well-being. By doing so, they risk exposing themselves to dangers associated with their profession. While the physical risks are well documented, the psychological risks are harder to quantify. This thesis investigates the psychological impact on journalists of exposure to potentially traumatic events and transgressions of deeply held moral beliefs. Six studies are presented with the first four focusing on the fear- and anxiety-based aspects of trauma and the remaining two focusing on moral injury. The first study, a mapping review of the trauma literature, concludes that journalists are at an elevated risk for exposure to potentially traumatic events, and that rates of trauma-related psychopathology are higher than in the general population. Study two and three reveal that posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) phenomenology is dominated by reexperiencing symptoms in a sample of journalists with well over a decade of frontline experience and that print reporters in the same sample are at a higher risk for PTSD and depression than photographers. An investigation of Afghan journalists in study four highlights the extreme stressors confronted by them, their correspondingly high levels of psychopathology and the relative ineffectiveness of mental health therapy given to a minority of those in distress. The mapping review of the moral injury literature in study five finds that journalists may be at an elevated risk for moral injury and that more research is needed to determine the nature and effects of moral injury and how it pertains to journalists. The most salient finding to emerge from this literature review is the need for the development and validation of a journalist-specific moral injury scale. The sixth study details the development of such a scale. The Toronto Moral Injury Scale for Journalists is theoretically and statistically robust and gives the profession, for the first time, a content relevant psychometric measure to inform clinical care and future research.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".