Criminology Research Council grant ; (10/78)
Note: No final report was submitted for this project and the project was terminated in 1986.
The interim report authored by Mr Stephen James on one aspect of this research was received by the Council in 1979. This interim report described a study into aspects of police perceptions of their occupational and social roles. A random sampling, stratified by rank, of 200 members of the Victoria Police was drawn, and invitations to attend individual interviews were mailed. Seventy-five policemen were finally interviewed and their responses tabulated. The interviews were conducted in private in the Criminology Department, University of Melbourne, and followed a standardised format with open-ended responses.
Various areas of police work, suggested by other researchers as possible locations for the generation of stress and stress-related responses, were probed through the interview. In general, the findings support other studies which place emphasis on role conflict and ambiguity, family and social relationships, community attitudes towards the police and the quantitative and qualitative aspects of workload as foci of police problems. Responses were not always unequivocally interpretable; nevertheless concerns such as lack of public cooperation and understanding in regard to police work, social difficulties due to being a police officer, family disruption through shift work, confusions over the scope of responsibility and authority, expected levels of support from superiors, and problems with health emerged as significant issues for a considerable number of the sample.
The range of descriptive data on the subjective police working environment elicited by the study suggests that certain features of police work qualify as stressors. The extent to which individual police cope with these stressors, and the precise consequences of long-term exposure are among many of the questions which remain unanswered about occupational stress. In the Criminology Department, University of Melbourne, different methodological strategies are being adopted in further work on police stress in order to answer these questions.