Burnout and Stress Measurement in Police Officers: Literature Review and a Study With the Operational Police Stress Questionnaire

Reviewed by: Olivia Carlson-Johnson, Institute for Intergovernmental Research (IIR), United States; Brooke McQuerrey Tuttle, Oklahoma State University, United States; Alex Renee Thornton, Indiana University, United States

This article was submitted to Organizational Psychology, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology

This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

Associated Data

The datasets generated for this study are available on request to the corresponding author, after National Portuguese Police authorization.

Abstract

Research has demonstrated that policing is a stressful occupation and that this stress has a negative impact on police officers’ mental and physical health, performance, and interactions with citizens. Mental health at the workplace has become a concern due to the costs of depression, anxiety, burnout, and even suicide, which is high among police officers. To ameliorate occupational health, it is therefore crucial to identify stress and burnout levels on a regular basis. However, the instruments frequently used to measure stress have not valorized the specificity of policing tasks. This study aims to: (i) conduct a literature review to identify questionnaires used to assess occupational stress and burnout among police officers; (ii) analyze the psychometric characteristics of a Portuguese version of Operational Police Stress Questionnaire (PSQ-Op); and, using the PSQ-Op and other questionnaires, (iii) to identify operational stress, burnout, and distress levels among Portuguese police officers. The literature review identified 108 studies which use a multiplicity of questionnaires to measure burnout or occupational stress among police officers, but few studies use specific police stress questionnaires. Sample sizes were mostly below 500 participants and studies were mainly developed in the last decade in the USA and Brazil, but also in another 24 countries, showing the extent of the interest in this topic. This study applied to 2057 police officers from the National Portuguese Police, a force policing urban centers, and used the PSQ-Op, as well the Spanish Burnout Inventory and the Kessler Psychological Distress Scale. The results show that the psychometric properties of the Portuguese version of PSQ-Op are adequate. Factorial analysis revealed two dimensions defined as social and work issues, which were associated with measures of distress and burnout. Fit indices suggested a second-order solution called operational police stress. Overall, and considering the scale range of each questionnaire, the results showed moderate values of operational stress, distress, and burnout. However, considering their cut-off points, 85% of the sample presented high operational stress levels, 11% critical values for burnout, and 28% high distress levels, with 55% of the sample at risk of a psychological disorder. These results reinforce the need to prevent stress and to invest in police officers’ occupational health.

Introduction

According to recent systematic reviews, being a police officer seems to be a highly demanding and stressful occupation, due to the current characteristics of modern societies. For a police officer, those characteristics include: the uncertainty and danger related to the permanent threat of terrorist attacks, the increase of violence with firearms in urban areas, low human and material resources, team or supervision difficulties, criticism from citizens and society, and lack of understanding from family or friends (Cumming et al., 1965; Webster, 2013; Magnavita et al., 2018; Purba and Demou, 2019). Numerous studies have tried to map police officers’ stress and its sources, a topic highlighted in the 1980s by the NIOSH technical report (Hurrell et al., 1984), and in the 1990s by Norvell et al. (1993), whose study focused on the influence of gender differences on law enforcement officers. Brown and Campbell (1994), Violanti and Aron (1995), and Stinchcomb (2004) also studied the sources of policing stress. However, this topic has attracted more interest in the last decade, with studies developed, for example, by Hickman et al. (2011), Luceño-Moreno et al. (2016), and Violanti et al. (2017), all of whom continue to identify police officers’ stress sources and its negative impact on police officers’ health and job performance. More recently, Baldwin et al. (2019), Wassermann et al. (2019), and Ermasova et al. (2020) have contributed to the study of police officers’ stress and psychological/physical health. Related studies have focused more specifically on occupational stress (e.g., Agolla, 2009; Maran et al., 2015; Gutshall et al., 2017; Johnson et al., 2019), while others have investigated police officers’ burnout (e.g., Aguayo et al., 2017; Adams and Mastracci, 2019).

This has led to an increasing interest in police officers’ psychological well-being, with researchers emphasizing the negative impact of working with negative social situations, such as crime and death (Henry, 2004), which can affect mental health and elicit physical fatigue, compassion fatigue, and even moral suffering (Basinska and Wiciak, 2012; Papazoglou, 2016; Papazoglou et al., 2017, 2020; Violanti et al., 2019). Moreover, studies have concluded that job stress has consistently increased among police officers in the last decade, and this chronic job stress negatively affects both the person and the organization. Individually, it leads to poor mental health (Baldwin et al., 2019; Castro et al., 2019), work-family conflict (Griffin and Sun, 2018), non-adaptive coping strategies and job stress (LeBlanc et al., 2008; Zulkafaly et al., 2017), emotional labor (van Gelderen et al., 2007), burnout (Pines and Keinan, 2005, 2007; Rosa et al., 2015), and even suicide (Violanti, 1996; Blazina, 2017; Costa et al., 2019; Grassi et al., 2018). Organizationally, it affects performance (Shane, 2010; Bertilsson et al., 2019; Kelley et al., 2019), counterproductive work behaviors (Smoktunowicz et al., 2015), and inappropriate interactions with citizens, such as the use of excessive force (Neely and Cleveland, 2011; Mastracci and Adams, 2019).

A number of news sources have recently reported that France 1 faces an increasing number of police officers committing suicide, especially after the intense work due to the “yellow vests/jackets” manifestations, while Spain 2 and Portugal 3 have also experienced several suicides of police officers, which motivated police officers to demonstrate in the streets and show their anger with job conditions in France 4 and Portugal 5 . Hard working conditions and colleagues’ suicides elicit continuous suffering and psychological pain that affects police officers, their families, and their tasks in important domains of urban life: safety and security. Additionally, stressful situations can increase the use of antidepressants, anxiolytics, or tranquilizers to alleviate psychological suffering, with Portugal being one of the countries where this increased use is the highest in Europe (OECD, 2019), suggesting the need to invest in stress and anxiety prevention and in occupational health.

Despite the increased number of studies analyzing occupational stress and burnout among police officers, researchers frequently use measurement instruments developed for other professional groups which do not apply to the specificities of police tasks, including emotional labor and physical risks. This study aims to: (i) conduct a literature review to identify questionnaires that have been used to assess occupational stress and burnout among police officers; (ii) analyze the psychometric characteristics of a Portuguese version of Operational Police Stress Questionnaire (PSQ-Op), developed by McCreary and Thompson (2006), to assess the specificities of job stress among police officers; and, using the PSQ-op and other questionnaires, (iii) identify operational stress, burnout, and distress levels among Portuguese police officers.

Regarding burnout and occupational stress measurement among police officers, in the 1970s Freudenberger (1974) and Maslach (1976) identified the symptoms of burnout and defined burnout syndrome as a psychological disorder triggered by chronic exposure to work stress. Burnout has attracted considerable interest in the scientific community and has become a concern for workers, being recognized as a serious professional hazard and a psychosocial risk at work. The definition presented by Maslach and Jackson (1981) seems to be the most consensual, and states that burnout is a three-dimensional syndrome that affects workers whose job tasks are mainly related to helping and delivering care or services to other persons. Burnout is expressed by emotional exhaustion (feeling fatigued and powerless to provide more support to others), depersonalization (showing a disengaged, cynical, cold, and unsympathetic attitude toward persons at work, especially those who seek help or ask for services), and feelings of low professional achievement (feeling personal and professional inadequacy, and having a higher likelihood of committing errors during job tasks). Later, as a result of continuous research on burnout (Maslach and Leiter, 2016, 2017; Maslach, 2017) stated that burnout occurs more frequently among professionals who work with other persons, especially as service providers where, over the years, they must respond to the client’s demands in a society increasingly based on service exchanges, which elicits job stress.

Burnout appears as a response to chronic job stress (Schaufeli, 2017) and has become an epidemic phenomenon with costs for workers and organizations, which is a concern that has been repeatedly highlighted by the European Agency for Safety and Health at Work (EU-OSHA, 2018), namely with its “Healthy Workplaces” campaign. Moreover, several key organizations have reinforced the importance of burnout in modern society. On 10 October 2017, the World Health Organization (WHO) defined mental health in the workplace as the theme for World Mental Health Day, highlighting job stress among specific professional groups, and in 2019 the WHO defined suicide prevention as the theme 6 , alerting the public to the risk of suicide among specific professional groups. In September 2018, the European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions (EUROFOUND, 2018) published the report “Burnout in the workplace: A review of data and policy responses in the EU,” which found that burnout had become a serious problem in Europe and that measures were needed to assess its levels among different occupations. In May 2019, the WHO 7 recognized burnout as an occupational phenomenon to be included in the next version of the International Classification of Diseases. Also in 2019, the European Agency for Safety and Health at Work (EU-OSHA, 2019a, b) referred again to “The value of occupational safety and health and the societal costs of work-related injuries and diseases.” Again in 2019, the results of the “Third European Survey of Enterprises on New and Emerging Risks (ESENER-3”) reinforced the negative impact of job stress and the importance of occupation health in preventing occupational stress among other psychosocial risks, a topic that the WHO 8 also highlighted.

According to Lazaus and Folkman (1984, p. 21), “psychological stress, therefore, is a relationship between the person and the environment that is appraised by the person as taxing or exceeding his or her resources and endangering his or her well-being.” Based on this definition, the concept of stress at the workplace, job stress, or occupational stress can be defined as a “pattern of physiological, emotional, cognitive, and behavioral responses that occur when workers are presented with work demands not matched to their knowledge, skills, or abilities and which challenge their ability to cope” (Patel et al., 2017, p. 1), negatively influencing the worker’s wellbeing, performance, and productivity (Quick and Henderson, 2016). Moreover, stress, especially job stress and occupational stress, are related and can predict burnout, since job stress can result from the relationship between job demands and job resources, or from the effort-reward imbalance (Peiró et al., 2001; Lin et al., 2013; Chirico, 2016; Patel et al., 2017; Salvagioni et al., 2017; Wang et al., 2017). Furthermore, burnout can be a long-term process of resource depletion and inadequate responses to chronic job stress (Maslach et al., 2001; Schaufeli, 2017). Burnout is difficult to distinguish from depression since they share similar symptoms (Bianchi et al., 2015; Golonka et al., 2019; Koutsimani et al., 2019; Bianchi, 2020).

Using instruments that allow burnout and stress to be measured is therefore a vital necessity before designing intervention programs for resilience, stress management, and burnout or suicide prevention. However, for police officers as a professional group, those instruments must be chosen carefully, considering the specificity of their policing tasks. To identify the instruments used to measure burnout and stress among police officers, a literature search was performed between January and December 2019 on the EBSCO database of scientific papers, using the following search expression: “police officers” and “burnout or stress” and “instruments or tools or scale or questionnaire or inventory or measurement or assessment or evaluation.” The search found 191 scientific published papers after removing duplicated references. However, 49 papers were focused exclusively on post-traumatic stress disorder; 26 were written in languages other than English, Portuguese, or Spanish, or the complete paper was unavailable; 5 were theoretical papers; and 3 used qualitative methods. Thus, a final number of 108 studies were analyzed, identifying the publication year, number of participants, country of the sample, and instruments used for burnout and stress or occupational stress measurement.

Results of the literature review ( Table 1 ) revealed that most of the studies are recent ( Figure 1 ), though the interest in questionnaires to assess burnout or job stress began in the 1970s. In detail, 11 studies were published between 1979 and 1989, 13 between 1990 and 1999, 18 between 2000 and 2009, and 66 between 2010 and 2019. The samples came from 26 countries ( Figure 2 ), mostly the USA (33), but Brazil appears with 12 studies, 4 or 5 studies were found in the UK, Poland, India, Canada, Spain, and the Netherlands, and 2 or 3 in Switzerland, Sweden, Portugal, Taiwan, Jamaica, Italy, Greece, Germany, and Finland. Three papers used samples from several countries in the same study. Finally, countries with only one study included Thailand, Sri Lanka, South Korea, South Africa, Pakistan, Lithuania, Israel, and China. These data express the global interest of scientific research in stress among police officers.

TABLE 1

Studies using questionnaires to measure burnout or occupational stress of police officers.