Perceived Stress Among Police and Correctional Officers

There is no doubt that police and correctional officers face an extraordinary amount of work related stress. The current study hopes to shed additional light on what stressors each profession perceives as being particularly stressful, establish how each profession copes with these stressors, and conclude with what similarities or dissimilarities exist between the two. Officers working for various police and correctional facilities in East Tennessee were surveyed for this study. Independent samples t-test determined that police and correctional officers are similar in many ways. However, correctional officers did reported statistically higher rates of stress associated with organizational aspects of the job (p=.029). Correctional officers and police officers reported identical rates of operational stress, overall stress, and use of coping strategies