Veteran contempt for civilian communication (VCCC): The development and validation of a scale for use with military veterans

Abstract

The purpose of this project was to develop and validate a measure of the amount of contempt military veterans feel toward civilian communication. Veterans may experience the moral emotion of contempt if they believe civilian communication violates the communal norms of the military. This study conjectures that communication-related contempt could be a root cause for veterans’ inability to reintegrate successfully into civilian society. Military socialization creates a deeply embedded military identity. If veterans cannot enact this communal identity with civilians, a gap may form between their communal identity frame and their enacted identity frame (Jung & Hecht, 2004). The larger the gap between these two identity frames, the more likely veterans are to withdraw from communicating with civilians. Such a withdrawal could lead to social isolation, which is linked to anxiety and depression (Fried et al., 2016). In the first study post-9/11 military veterans were recruited from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service and asked to complete the Veteran’s Contempt for Civilian Communication (VCCC) scale. The researcher then used exploratory factor analysis to examine underlying factor structures and reduce the number of items in the initial scale. Study 1 produced a 20 item VCCC scale that the researcher used in a second study. In Study 2 military veterans completed the VCCC as well as measures for willingness to communicate, communication apprehension, the military to civilian questionnaire (M2CQ), the UCLA loneliness scale, military identity scale, and the temporal satisfaction with life scale, in addition to demographic variables. Results of Study 2 confirmed the factor structure of the VCCC, through confirmatory factor analysis, and showed significant relationships with several other variables. Of interest is the significant relationship found between the VCCC and the M2CQ, loneliness, and military identity. Not only were significant correlations found for these variables, but significant regression results were found as well. A discussion of the methodological, theoretical, and practical implications of the newly created VCCC concludes the research project.