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Description: Understanding police officers' perceptions of their employee benefits is essential to making sure they receive the support they need to be successful. A number of researchers have analyzed the link between what has been termed benefit availability and job and family variables. This article contends that these researchers may not be measuring benefit availability, but instead are measuring benefit awareness, and that the difference between these two concepts has important implications for researchers and police departments.This research reviews previously employed measures of "availability," and results and implications derived from these analysis. Using a newly collected sample from state police officers with measures of both availability and awareness, estimates of the error rate between measuring benefit awareness and benefit availability were calculated and used to adjust correlations from other research to demonstrate the differences in results when benefit awareness is measured instead of benefit availability. The difference between benefit availability and benefit awareness may explain some of the inconsistencies in previous research of benefit availability. It also may indicate that departments need to focus more on how information is disseminated to officers than on providing more benefits.
Suggested Citation:
Lambert, A. D., & Steinke, C. M. (2015). Measuring benefit availability for officers: The error in perceptions
of what is offered and its effect on conclusions [Electronic Version]. Applied Psychology in Criminal Justice,
11(2), 93-110.
Keywords: benefit availability, benefit awareness, police well-being
Date: Jun 03, 2015 | File Size: 334.92 Kb | Downloads: 1388