| Police work is known for its stress and as being a gendered organization that exudes a masculine crime fighting image. Understanding and managing officer stress is important due to the increasing complexities that influence police work, the growing numbers of police officers in the nation, the increased diversity among the ranks, and the very nature and service of the profession. The present study's research question explores whether gender affects police officers' perception of stress, their resiliency, the work environment, work-family conflict, burnout and demographics (race, rank and education). Despite interest in the interplay between police organizational culture and stress, most research on police stress fails to investigate if gender plays a role or test for a gender effect by using it as a simple control variable. In order to more fully explore gender, stress, burnout and work-family conflict, this dissertation utilizes both quantitative and qualitative data. Data was collected from Troopers of the Delaware State Police through a web-based survey, resulting in a 21% completion rate of the sworn police officers, producing a sample of 136 officers. The results of correlations reveal that stress is significantly associated with all of the independent and control variables except for gender and ethnicity; however, the gender and ethnic diversity of the sample was small and may have affected the findings. The present study also finds that when stress is simultaneously regressed on all of the independent and control variables, the overall model is significant, and shows that 45.9% of the variance in stress is accounted for by two variables.;The findings indicate that male and female officers do not report significantly different levels of stress. From the qualitative responses, three themes emerged including; first, the organizational challenges, second, the emotional impacts of being a Trooper, and third, effects on the officers' support network. Thus, it can be concluded that personal accomplishment and emotional exhaustion are the best predictors of officers' stress, such that officers with higher personal accomplishment reported less stress and officers with more emotional exhaustion reported more stress. |
