Policing the demands of resourcing
by
Emma Masters
In an interesting twist, UniSA researchers are set to investigate the
police and the allocation of police resources.
Associate Professor Maureen Dollard and Professor Tony Winefield from UniSA’s Centre for Applied Psychology, along with international fellows Professor Jan De Jonge and Professor Arnold Bakker of Utrecht University, have won a prestigious Australian Research Council grant to investigate the issue of work stress for front line police officers in South Australia and Victoria.
“A lot of research looks inside organisations at job content and context, and the way jobs are designed, but we’re also looking at stress factors coming from outside of the organisation,” Prof Dollard said.
“We are looking upstream to the pressures on the organisational system to see how it eventually turns up in police officers’ reduced capacity to work, due to poor health and stress-related issues.
“Police resourcing is dependent on certain drivers. Socio-economic factors and the demographics of the community should determine how many police are needed but these factors are not used by police forces to allocate resources, resulting in a mismatch between the demands for police services and police resourcing.”
A pilot study of 710 Victorian police officers has already found levels of stress are quite high, particularly among senior sergeants.
“Sergeants identify that they don’t have enough resources to do the job, and then this leads to heavier work demands and higher levels of stress,” Prof Dollard said.
“It’s not just exposure to typical police operational demands like attending violent events and investigative work that are associated with wellbeing and morale in police. Levels of stress and morale are also directly attributable to community drivers for police presence, such as population size. These demands are not being offset by resources given to the officers, like time and people.
“What we’re seeing is consistent with other stress research, but few studies have examined the obviously important impact of upstream factors.”
The study is a collaboration between The South Australian Police Association and The Police Association, Victoria. It will run for three years, matching different types of psychosocial and economic data to get a detailed picture of the work environment of today’s police.
“We’re using socioeconomic data to predict resource allocation requirements and then we’re testing the model using data from surveys and interviews with the police officers,” Prof Dollard said.
“Discrepancy ratios between estimated numbers of officers required and those allocated will also be used to predict wellbeing in police officers.
“What we’re hoping to find out is whether the demands police officers experience from the day-to-day operations of the job, the job context, and upstream factors, can be offset by adequate resourcing.
“Our big hope is that we will see the best outcomes for officers in terms of wellbeing and morale when the type and level of available resources corresponds to existing demands.
“To put it differently, the discovery of optimal demand-resource combinations
will help us better understand how specific demands threaten and how specific
resources protect officers from developing strain or even enhance their
wellbeing.”