The Psychological Vest: Trauma, Resiliency, and Posttraumatic Growth Among Police Officers

Abstract

Police officers are often required to make split-second decisions in unpredictable and ambiguous critical situations, while held to extremely high moral and ethical standards and intense public scrutiny. Given their level of trauma exposure and risk for traumatic and morally injurious distress, it is vital to better understand psychosocial factors which serve to increase risk or resilience, to shape a metaphoric psychological vest. In addition, a psychometrically sound measure of moral injury is needed to accurately identify such risk and resiliency factors. The current dissertation project first investigated the psychometric properties of the Moral Injury Assessment for Public Safety Personnel (MIA-PSP). Next, thematically-connected psychological (i.e., facets of mattering, grit, socially prescribed perfectionism, self-compassion, posttraumatic cognitions) and social (i.e., workplace stress, job satisfaction, childhood adversity, social support, perceived public benevolence) factors were examined in their relatedness to posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), moral injury (MI), depression, anxiety, burnout, life satisfaction, and posttraumatic growth.

The sample of study were 367 police officers (Median = 20 years of service; 72.5% men) from 17 small to large municipal and provincial police services across Ontario. Officers completed an online battery of validated measures assessing both the aforementioned risk and resiliency factors and trauma-related outcomes.

First, regarding the MIA-PSP, confirmatory factor analysis modelling supported a correlated three-factor structure that was invariant across gender and years of service. Controlling for shared variance amongst the subscales, the emotional sequelae and betrayals subscales demonstrated unique predictive power with measures of trauma, trauma-related outcomes, and well-being. Findings suggest the MIA-PSP is a promising scale to assess MI within police populations.

Second, the psychosocial factors of anti-mattering, self-compassion, and posttraumatic cognitions were identified as predictive of every distressing trauma-related outcome under investigation. Heightened anti-mattering and posttraumatic cognitions served as risk factors for increased PTSD, MI, depression, anxiety, burnout and poorer life satisfaction, with heightened self-compassion serving as a resilience factor in buffering against those outcomes and facilitating life satisfaction and posttraumatic growth. These risk and resilience factors are posited as tied to a core emotion of shame, which is discussed with reference to notable opportunities for clinical intervention.