AN ASSESSMENT OF WORK STRESS AMONG POLICE EXECUTIVES

This article reports on a study of the determinants of role-stress amo ng police executives. The question guiding this research was: Are ther e broad features of the occupation or role of police executives that a ffect their perceptions of stress? Data were derived from a concatenat ion of two national samples of police executives, one for municipal po lice chiefs and the other for county sheriffs. A logit modeling strate gy was used to assess the contributions of variables of substantive in terest for police executives' perceptions of stress. Four measures of work stress were used for the analysis. It was found that police execu tives with lower levels of education, especially those with a high sch ool diploma or less, were more likely to perceive stress. Also, sherif fs consistently reported higher levels of stress than did chiefs. Howe ver, lower stress was reported for executives with greater autonomy an d those who perceived that they had control over the hiring process.