Development and validation of a brief warfare exposure measure among U.S. Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans: The Deployment Risk and Resilience Inventory-2 Warfare Exposure-Short Form (DRRI-2 WE-SF).

UNLABELLED: [Correction Notice: An Erratum for this article was reported online in Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy on Jun 30 2022 (see record 2022-76274-001). In the original article, the following acknowledgment of funding was missing from the title page author note: "This material was based upon work supported by the United States Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), Veterans Health Administration, Patient Care Services, Health Outcomes Military Exposures Epidemiology Program as well as two VA Health Services Research and Development Service Grants "Validation of Modified DRRI Scales in a National Sample of OEF/OIF Veterans" (Project DHI 09-086, Dawne Vogt, Principal Investigator) and "Work and Family Functioning in Women Veterans: Implications for VA Service Use" (Project IIR 12-345, Dawne Vogt and Brian N. Smith, Principal Investigators)." All versions of this article have been corrected.] Objective: It is important to assess warfare experiences beyond direct combat exposure, as these exposures can negatively impact military veterans' health. Although two validated scales from the Deployment Risk and Resilience Inventory-2 [DRRI-2] together capture a broad range of stressful warfare experiences, the length of this combined measure (30 items) is prohibitively long for some settings. Therefore, the goal of this project was to develop and validate a short form Warfare Exposure measure (DRRI-2-WE-SF).

METHOD: U.S. veterans deployed for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan completed questionnaires across 2 studies (study 1, N = 1046; study 2, N = 7141) to develop and validate the DRRI-2 WE-SF.

RESULTS: Study 1 involved developing the DRRI-2 WE-SF, a 9-item self-report instrument with strong internal consistency (α = .86) and large correlations with the full Warfare Exposure measure (r = .97). In study 2, the DRRI-2 WE-SF again demonstrated high levels of reliability and validity and evidenced high levels of classification accuracy (89.7% correct classification) and significant time savings (all ts > 39; all ps < .05) in comparison to the full measure.

CONCLUSIONS: The DRRI-2 WE-SF is a psychometrically sound measure of direct exposures to warfare and its consequences. This measure of proximal warfare exposure retains the strong properties of the full measure while significantly reducing completion time. These properties make the DRRI-2 WE-SF a useful tool for efficiently evaluating proximal warfare exposure among individuals who have served in both combat and noncombat roles. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).