Police Officer Occupation Research Recently, 163 police officers have been laid off in Camden and the community most certainly feeling the impact -- as "callers to 911 who report things like home burglaries or car break-ins are asked to file a report over the phone or at police headquarters; officers rarely respond in person" (Goldstein, 2011). When police officers are laid off and removed from the community, like in Camden, the safety of the community is jeopardized and the police officers that are still employed are in increasing danger, since the human police resources have been cut. The importance of police officers are evident so it is important to further explore the type of people that they are, the many different components of their occupation, including job hazards. The goal of this criminal justice research would be to capture a complete and detailed overview of police officers, specifically what the job hazards of their occupation is and why police officers choose to continue with this occupation despite knowing the hazards of the job.

Foremost, the research methods that would likely be the best fit to complete the research goal at hand would be and one-on-one interview structure, along with some type of shadowing exercise in which the researcher could follow the officer on his or her daily activities. During the shadowing, it would also be useful to capture the how and why, along with the characteristics and traits that police officers possess that make the able to overcome the job hazards and continue doing their job. This interview structure would work the best because the one-on-one portion would help the researcher gain rapport with the police officer being interviewed, along with the ability to ask detailed questions and probe into specific things that are mentioned during the interview. Having one-on-one time with a police officer offers the time,...

Ideally, there would be multiple one-on-one interviews with police officers to gain as much information over the course of all the interviews. Also, the shadowing component of the interview would also be important in that the on-the-job component would help capture their emotions and feelings about the job, and would also serve as an observational time for the researcher to capture the type of traits that the police officers have. This could also be a time to see how police officers react to certain occupational hazards. After an occupational hazard is observed, the researcher should attempt to capture the thoughts and feelings that the police officers have.
The type of research method, as outlined above, is founded in the fundamentals of qualitative research. Qualitative research has many advantages, two of the main advantages include the ability to, "produce more in-depth quality information" and that it uses "subjective information and participant observation to describe the context, or natural setting, of the variables under consideration, as well as the interactions of the different variables in the context" as it "seeks a wide understanding of the situation" (Key, 1997). These are important advantages to gain details and paint a more complete picture, in this specific case, of the overview of police officer job on a daily basis, specifically what the job hazards of their occupation is and why police officers choose to continue with this occupation despite knowing the hazards of the job.

If given the opportunity to complete this research, one of the most important components of this the interviews and shadowing would be the questions that are asked. Some specific topics that would need to be explored include, at first,…