Police officers are subject to stressors from traumatic incidents, day to day policing duties
as well as organizational sources. This quantitative study examined 195 serving police
officers in the Vancouver Police Department to determine what if any relationship existed
between any prevalence of traumatic symptoms and their years of experience as police
officers. Trauma symptoms were measured through the use of the Trauma Symptom
Inventory, which was administered to a randomly selected sample. The sample was
divided into seven groups based on years of completed service; recruits, 0<2 years, 2<5
years, 5<10 years, 10<15 years, 15<20 years and 20+ years. While the recruit group
showed a spike on the validity scale of Response Level and there were spikes in
Anger/Irritability and Depression among the 2<5 years and 20+ groups respectively, most
of the significant scores were among the group 10<15 years. This group showed
significantly elevated scores in Atypical Responses, Anxious Arousal, Anger/Irritability,
Depression, Intrusive Experience, Defensive Avoidance and Impaired Self Reference. In
terms of support the respondents indicated through a demographic questionnaire that
Family Support was the one most frequently endorsed at the high level, followed by
Social Support and then by Peer Support. There was also low levels of endorsement of
the Critical Item on the TSI that had to do with hurting others and problems due to
alcohol consumption and sexual behaviour. Empirical support and personal experiences
of the researcher are provided as explanations for the trends. The number of females in
the latter groups was limited due to the demographics of the population. Several
recommendations are made for future research as well as recommendations to the
Vancouver Police Department to address the findings with their sworn members.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:BVAU.2429/12731 |
| Date | 05 1900 |
| Creators | Ram, Jessbir L. |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Relation | UBC Retrospective Theses Digitization Project [http://www.library.ubc.ca/archives/retro_theses/] |
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