Measuring policing stress meaningfully: establishing norms and cut-off values for the Operational and Organizational Police Stress Questionnaires

The Operational and Organizational Police Stress Questionnaires (PSQ-Op and PSQ-Org) are useful tools for understanding individual differences in the perception of policing-specific stress. However, two of the limitations of the PSQ-Op and PSQ-Org are their lack of normative values that provide organizations with a baseline with which to judge the effectiveness of stress-reduction interventions or new resilience-based training initiatives and cut-offs that can identify the percentage of employees who might be experiencing high, moderate, and low levels of policing-specific stress. Specifically, they do not allow individual departments or policing organizations to assess the relative degree of work-related stress their members are experiencing, or to determine whether that level of stress is excessive. To address this gap in knowledge, we developed gender-based norms and cut-off values for the two PSQ measures. These norms are provided for both overall scale scores and individual items, and implications for addressing officer stress are discussed.