Educational Competency as an Indicator of Occupational Stress for Probation and Parole Officers

Probation and parole officers are assigned the responsibility of supervising convicted criminals in a community setting in such a way that the competing goals of punishment, public safety, offender rehabilitation, and deterrence are achieved. All the while, these tasks are accomplished within the confines of shrinking budgets, large case loads, increasingly high-risk offenders, low occupational prestige, and considerable political and public scrutiny. These competing demands often result in especially high levels of work-related stress. The point of this research is to consider the divergence in occupational stress among probation/parole officers and whether or not they felt educationally prepared for their job. The data for this study were collected during a two-month study period which began on March 15, 2005. Data were collected non-randomly through a national Internet based survey of active probation/parole officers. This study considers a sub-sample of 2, 364 officers from fifteen states. The results show probation/parole officers who feel educationally under-prepared are likely to experience higher levels of occupational stress and more likely to have negative manifestations of stress than those officers who feel well-prepared.     

Opening a window into police internal affairs: Impact of procedural justice reform on third-party attitudes

The study explores the impact of a procedural innovation on justice judgments made by third party observers. The innovation involved the establishment of a review panel with civilian participants to monitor a police department's investigation of allegations of misconduct against its officers. The study distinguishes the impact on racial minority observers from that on racial majority observers. Data suggest that the innovation had a positive, though differing, impact on the justice judgments of both minority and majority observers.     

Analyzing Multiple-Item Measures of Crime and Deviance I: Item Response Theory Scaling

Multiple-item measures of self-reported offending typically provide the principal outcome measures for individual level research on the causes of crime and deviance. This article directs attention to the substantial problems presented by the task of forming composite scores for these measures, and it presents a possible solution to those problems. We consider scaling by means of the graded response model from item response theory (IRT) as a potential means of overcoming the shortcomings of traditional summative scaling and of obtaining valuable information about the strengths and weaknesses of our measures. We illustrate this strategy through a scale analysis of a fourteen-item, self-report measure of delinquency, using three years of data from the Monitoring the Future study, an annual national survey of high school seniors. The graded response model proves to be consistent with the data, and it provides results that address important substantive questions about self-report measures. The findings are informative about the strengths and weaknesses of alternative strategies for developing self-report instruments, indicating that there is little to be gained by making fine distinctions in the frequency of individual delinquent acts.