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ABSTRACT
Police work is widely regarded as highly stressful, characterized by a rather unique rule-driven internal organizational environment, external sources of insecurity, and high expectations about one's abilities. Over the past 30 years, scholars have attempted to identify the most important factors associated with police stress. Some suggest that an officer's marital status should be a highly relevant factor. The purpose of this paper is to address a basic question in this regard: Does marital status matter with regard to job-related stress? Three distinctive groups of police officers are identified based on their marital statusBnamely, police couple, non-police couple, and other. Using data derived from a survey of over 1,000 officers in a large metropolitan police department in the east coast, our multivariate analyses suggest that marital status inserts only marginal effect on police stress. In contrast, police work environment, work-family conflict and individual coping mechanism are the most significant predictors of police stress.
