Behind blue doors: cisgender female police officers’ experiences of psychological stress and mental health
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The purpose of this study was to identify and describe how female police officers experience psychological stress, what elements or factors impacted their experiences of psychological stress, and why psychological stress was experienced within their employment as officers. It explored the impacts of psychological stress on overall mental health. Critical realist theory informed the multiple case study design that revealed generative mechanisms capable of producing the participants’ lived experiences. The data were collected from semi-structured interviews with 14 cis-gender female police officers employed within 10 Canadian policing organizations across 11 diverse geographical locations. Additional data sources (grey literature, newspaper articles, a documentary) were analyzed as well. Thematic analysis was completed through which five themes were revealed: moral toll, procedural injustice, mental health impacts, mental health support/promotion, and mentorship, interpersonal relationships, and shared experience. A critical realist framework highlighting anti-oppressive and feminist concepts was used to analyze the data related to the identified themes. The results suggested that cis-gendered female police officers’ psychological stress experiences occurred due to complex and compounding interactions between various system levels (macro, meso, and micro), each containing intricate entities of its own. Patriarchal ideology and continued measures intended to preserve male domination over females were the mechanisms that generated much of the women’s stress and mental health problems. Theoretical contributions include the application and elaboration of anti-oppressive concepts to a new setting, a police context. This inclusion helps provide a solid rationale for integrating both anti-oppressive and gendered lenses when designing, implementing, and evaluating policies and programming to ensure that the needs of policewomen are accurately represented and included. Such inclusion may help mitigate oppressive aspects and practices and prevent harm from occurring where possible. The findings also suggest the need for policing organizations to assess and interview potential therapist candidates to ensure they possess such knowledge and provide members with a list of suitable options. Future studies could include a more racially and sexually diverse group of participants, both on active duty and retired, to explore their experiences of psychological stress and mental health impacts.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".