Assessing Disruptions in Meaning: Development of the Global Meaning Violation Scale

Models of meaning making following stressful events are based on the notion that individuals’ appraisals of events (i.e., their situational meaning) can violate their goals and beliefs (i.e., global meaning), and that resulting discrepancies between situational meaning and global meaning negatively affect their psychological adjustment. To date, research has relied primarily on indirect measures of meaning violation. We describe the development of a new instrument, the Global Meaning Violation Scale (GMVS), for directly assessing belief and goal violations. We establish the psychometric integrity of the GMVS across three studies. In Study 1, we identify and replicate a factor structure consisting of three subscales: belief violation, intrinsic goal violation, and extrinsic goal violation. In Study 2, we provide evidence for the reliability and validity of the GMVS. In Study 3, we test the predictive validity of the GMVS in a sample of undergraduates reporting on the most stressful experiences of their lives. Our findings indicate that the GMVS is a reliable and valid tool for directly examining global meaning violation. We anticipate that the GMVS will advance research on stress, trauma, and coping by giving researchers a tool to directly explore the role of violations in meaning making processes.