The subjective experience of United Nations peacekeeping duty: The concerns of Finnish police officers on war zone duty in the former Yugoslavia

Interview transcripts of 11 Finnish CIVPOL officers were analyzed for themes. These interviews had been conducted in the war zones of Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina during 1994 and 1995. The review of psychological literature found an absence of understanding about two important elements of this study. There were no reports of data collected during traumatic events, and few reports on pre-exposure person-variables involved in the development of post-trauma sequelae.; This study explored into the subjective experience of being in a war. The intention was to: (1) discover the subjective experience of being in an active war zone; (2) identify factors unique to being in war that might predispose people to have difficulty readjusting to home. Due to the lack of understanding about the research questions, an ad hoc method was derived from the current qualitative methods for analysis of interview data. After reducing the data to clauses, the WinMax software program assisted coding clauses into hierarchical structure of similar thematic categories and subcategories. The subcategories were the closest descriptions of subjective experience.; The thematic analysis proceeded with 4 randomly selected transcripts and revealed intrapsychic and interpersonal processes that mediated the extreme working conditions of UN peacekeepers. The participants experienced themselves as proactive and pre-reflexively focused on their immediate circumstances. These findings supported earlier findings that during combat, soldiers lived in the immediate moment and did not reflect on their experiences. Without the usual forms of interpersonal support in police operations, the participants turned inward to their internal models for standards for ethical conduct. By conforming to their internal standards the participants may have achieved a degree of fulfillment and equanimity in their CIVPOL work, unlike what they would encounter while on duty in Finland.; Most of the participants evidenced successful adaptation to the demands of the war zones. Conceptually, the turning inward was seen as the dynamic relationship between to processes of becoming and two states of being. This dynamic allowed the participants to focus on their immediate context while being proactive. The study described the attitudes that supported this dynamic and its complementary relationship to their self-concept.