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"Yet he also noted that mental states are difficulty to quantify. You can count, say, the number of people a soldier believes he killed. But how do you measure disillusionment? In a scientific study, Shay noted, there is "a constant suction toward measurability" and away from topics that seem too squishy to quantify."
It sounds like this issue needs a qualitative study that develops a definition of the concept "disillusionment," and then some nice, quantitative measures that ask vets things like, "While in combat, how much did you feel the Americans back home were not supporting your efforts on a Likert scale from 1-7."
That gets the ball rolling and begins to identify the aspects of disillusionment that are relevant to the hypothesis that disillusionment is a moderator of PTSD.
That's why science invented the squishy approach of qualitative studies.
--cbelz
