Author Keywords: police stress
; occupational health; job satisfaction; questionnaire development
This article describes the development and validation of the Operational Police Stress
Questionnaire (PSQ-Op) and the Organizational Police
Stress
Questionnaire (PSQ-Org). In Study 1, a series of focus groups were used to elicit the most common stressors associated with policing. During this study, it became apparent that officers separated their stressors into two general categories: operational and organizational. In the following three studies, the PSQ-Op and PSQ-Org were assessed for reliability and validity. The findings showed that both forms of the PSQ were reliable and demonstrated construct validity (correlations between perceived
stress
and frequency), discriminant validity (compared with general life stressors), and concurrent validity (compared with job satisfaction measures).
Portions of this article were presented at the joint American Psychological Association/National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health “Work, Stress,
and Health” Conference, Miami, FL, March 2006. We thank the many police officers who completed our focus groups and questionnaires, as well as Teresa Reimann, Wendy Sullivan-Kwantes, Peter Shipley, and Janice Mokanski for their invaluable assistance with data collection. This project was funded by a grant to the authors from the Workplace Safety & Insurance Board of Ontario.