Shanghai Ideal Police Psychological Quality Research

Meta-analyses have shown that personality measuere can predict job performance fairly well under certain conditions. But most widely-used personality scales were used to measure deviant personality traits, which function better to screen-out than to select in. In order to find out out the traits that an ideal police officer should possess, this research employed the qualitative research, combined with questionnaire, to explore the psychological qualities of police offiecer in Shanghai. As a result, the 35 traits that were identified by participants and the 30 words in questionnaire were coucluded into 4 categories: sense of mission (respponsiblity, self-discipline), emotional management (intro- and extro), intelligence and ablity, and attitude.In addition, this reseach collected matericals form semi-structured interviews with 28 in-field police officers and observation. The constant comparative method was the specific technique used to code and understand these data. Over four successive phases of analyses thes quotes were clustered into internally homogeneous and externally heterogeneous groups. 43 categories, 18 sub-constructs, 7 constructs and two themes-individual factor and job factor were generated. Finally, these two themes were combined to produce the overarching concept: personality and ability-job fit. Individual fator included psychological qualities, special ablities and some objective basic requirements. Job factor included properties of the job, influences that job causes to individual, development of the job and the environment ofthe job.This research employed the interpretative analysis to understand the data, which showed, the psychological qualities of ideal police officers in Shanghai were closely related to the characteristics of the job. It is a dynamic process involves individual factor and job factor. Then, the author promoted useful discussion of selection and training of police officers in Shanghai, both of which should be based on the identification of the specific job. On selection, more attention should be attatched to the research in psychology. And on training, the courses and methods should be adjusted to meet the demands of job.