Distinguishing traumatic, vicarious and routine operational stressor exposure and attendant adverse consequences in a sample of police officers

Problems in studying occupational stress within the police service are iden tified and the paucity of work on operational duties as potential stressors are discussed. The present study reports the results of a factor analysis of operational stressors (N = 601 serving British police officers) that rev ealed three factors. exposure to death and disaster; violence and injury; s exual crime. These were demonstrated to be reliable scales and were include d in logistic regression models together with a range of demographic and ps ychological variables. Models were applied to men and women separately, whi ch showed there to be different predictors of the likelihood of suffering d istress (measured by the General Health Questionnaire, GHQ) in terms of the officer's gender and operational role. Overall the model for women officer s was better at predicting psychological distress than that for men. These findings are related to aspects of the police occupational culture. Further discussion is offered that conceptualizes police operational stressors as traumatic, routine and vicarious. Finally, some implications are drawn for the provision of stress intervention in the light of this differentiation.