Postmission Altruistic Identity Disruption Questionnaire (PostAID/Q): Preliminary development of a measure of responses following adverse humanitarian aid work.

Abstract

Increasingly, humanitarian aid personnel are exposed to both vicarious and primary traumatic events. The Postmission Altruistic Identity Disruption Questionnaire (PostAID/Q) was developed with the aim of guiding humanitarian organizations in the psychosocial aftercare of personnel particularly their reintegration within families, the workplace, and society postmission. Altruistic identity disruption refers to reintegration difficulties experienced by returnees from humanitarian work such that the person feels alienated, invalidated, isolated from others who do not share his or her experiences, and questioning of their role as an aid worker. The PostAID/Q is an 18-item self-report measure designed to assess altruistic identity disruption. Sixty-one aid personnel completed an initial pool of 79 items developed by the authors from semistructured interviews with aid personnel. Following inspection of item frequencies, 36 items were retained. Following principal components analysis with a forced one-component solution, 18 items were selected to compose the PostAID/Q. The PostAID/Q promises to be useful to both aid organizations and the individual aid worker in the reintegration period postmission by (a) guiding organizations in their psychosocial support of aid personnel; (b) assisting personnel in identifying interpersonal, environmental, and perceived organizational influences on their psychosocial well-being; and (c) indicating returnees' subsequent readiness for redeployment. Language: en