Police Job Stress and Stress Reduction/Coping Programs: The Effects on the Relationship with Spouses

Being a police is considered one of the highly stressful occupations because of the reasons such as long irregular hours, hierarchic structure and safety concerns. Job stress might not only have adverse effects on himself/herself, but also on the officer’s department and family. In this study, however, the effects of the job stress on the spousal relationship are examined. A secondary data that have 1,632 responses by police officer are used to test the hypotheses. Because the dependent variable is ordinal, ordinal logistic estimators are used to find the coefficient effects. The findings indicate that high level of stress experienced in the job is positively, strongly and significantly associated with the dependent variable. Moreover, when the officer used stress reduction/coping programs (SRCPs), the better gets the relationship with his/her spouse. Interestingly, higher level of education increases the likelihood of the spousal relational problems. At the end, several suggestions were made to the police departments in terms of helping the officers that are affected adversely by job stress.