Stress on Law Enforcement Personnel

Stress on Law Enforcement Personnel critical literature review on stress among law enforcement personnel, its negative consequences and strategies used to combat it

The focus of this research is two-fold: the study attempts to identify, firstly, the negative consequences or effects of stress among law enforcement personnel, and secondly, identify the extant strategies used to combat stress in the field of law enforcement. Determining the development of negative stress among law enforcement personnel will contribute to research information centering on the significance of qualitative research in probing deeper into the occurrence and managing stress in the field of law enforcement.

As such, the general objective of the research is also two-fold. The first objective is to determine the existence and nature of negative stress among law enforcement personnel in (blank, please fill in the specific location of the law enforcement sector being studied). The second general objective, meanwhile, attempts to identify the strategies adopted by law enforcement personnel to combat the negative effects of stress.

With these two general objectives of the study in mind, the research paradigm that will be used is qualitative, while the research designs are descriptive and exploratory in gathering, analyzing, and interpreting primary and secondary data in order to provide a general description of the nature of negative stress and strategies to combat it among law enforcement personnel.

Primary research method used for the study is in-depth or focused interviews of law enforcement personnel. The reason for choosing this kind of research method is that in-depth interviewing provides information that would otherwise be not generated through focus group discussions (FGDs) or interview surveys. Previous studies on negative stress in the field of law enforcement illustrated how, in general, negative stress in law enforcement identifies only the nature, causes, and effects of stress. Coping strategies, however, are not effectively conveyed in survey studies (Harpold and Feemster, 2002). Similarly, the use of FGD may result to numerous information that does not fully delve into the objectives of the study, particularly the authenticity of information, since FGD is susceptible to group pressure and inability of the researcher's to probe deeper into the thoughts and feelings of the informant for fear or embarrassment of disclosing sensitive and confidential information (Sheehan, 2003).