The Relationship Between Police Stress And Burnout

Objective:The primary purpose of this research was To dev elop and to examine the reliability and validity of a police stress scale, and to analyze the level of stress and job burnout,and to investigate the mechani sm of the relationship between stress and occupational burnout in police offi cers. Method:First we established a theoretical idea on the basis of a litera ture study, then40police officers were interviewed with a half-structured qu estionnaire, according to the recording of the interview and expert assessmen t, a police stress scale of46iterms was initially formed. Second, we chose two police samples from Sichuan Province by stratified random sampling, sa mple1was used to conduct the item analysis and exploratory factor analysi s,sample2was used to conduct the confirmatory factor analysis. Third, the research surveys322police officers chosen randomly by cunducting the Poli ce Stress Scale and Maslach Burnout Inventory-General Survey. ANOVA, cor relation analysis and stepwise regression analysis were used to investigate th e levels of stress and job burnout according to the demographic factors and to find out which stressors affect job burnout.Moreover,mediator testing meth od was used to examine the mediation of negative emotion between police s tressors and occupational burnout. Result:The final questionnaire consisted o f a total of43items,and the stressors of police officers can be seperated int o6dimensions, these dimensions are task-related stressor, social life stressor, power motive stressor,self-ralated stressor, negative emotion stressor and org anization management stressor. The internal coefficient and the spilit reliabilit y were both higher than0.7.Criterion validity coefficient between the scale a nd the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI) was0.591, which showed that the police stress scale questionnaire had good criterion validity. The result of c onfirmatory factor analys showed that the goodness of fit for the model is well,and better than the theoretical model.Besides, and the task-related stresso r is the biggest stressor.Second,police officers differ significantly in every str essors and cynicism according to the levels of different age, older police sh owed higher levels in six dimensions of stressors and cynicism. Third, job b urnout is significantly affected by stress regression analysis showed that task-related stressor and negative emotion stressor could predict job burnout stro ngly, and the negative emotion stressor plays the most important role in job burnout. Fourth, negative emotion exerts a complete medium effect in the r elation between self-related stressor and job burnout, and the other stressors as task-related stressor, social life stressor, power motive stressor and organiz ation management stressor affect job burnout through partial intermediary of negative emotion respectively. Conclusion:The police stress scale could be suitable for measuring the stressors of police officers reliably and validly.Wh at’s more police officers have a high levels of stress and job burnout, in ol der to maintain police healthy in mind an body, the relevant departments s hould pay much more attention to help police officers master a positive moo d regulation method.