Influence of Occupational stress, Personality and Job demand on Mental health of Police officers in Nigeria

Abstract

Abstract Personality type, continuous exposure of police officers to traumatic and stressful events, and the demanding nature of their job are factors discovered through extensive literature review, to affect police officers’ mental health globally. Hence, a need to investigate the influence of occupational stress, personality, and job demand on police officers’ mental health in Ibadan, Nigeria was identified. The biopsychosocial model and Big Five personality model are the theoretical foundations for this study. A cross-sectional research design was adopted for this study. Cochran formula (1977) was used to determine the sample size of this study and a Multistage cluster sampling technique was used to select the research participants. A 75-item self-report questionnaire comprising socio-demographic, operational police stress scale (α .88), organizational police stress scale (α .91), job demand (α .54), personality (α .61), and mental health (α .66) was administered to the 328 participants. Descriptive statistics were used to analyze the socio-demographic variables, while Pearson product-moment correlation and multiple regression were used to test the two hypotheses for this study which was computed at < 0.05. Participants' mean age was 36.49 ± 10.56. Occupational stress has a significant negative relationship with mental health; the five personality dimensions have a significant positive relationship with mental health and the three independent variables of this study jointly predicted the mental health of Police officers in Ibadan. However, only four of the five personality dimensions independently predicted police officers in Ibadan’s Mental health and Job demand has no relationship with the mental health of Police officers in Ibadan.