Personality, social support, stress, and coping in a sample of Canadian paramedics

IMPACT

The authors’ finding that Canadian paramedics reported high levels of stress concurrent with evidence of predisposed resilience, suggests that emergency workers who, though predisposed towards stability, can find themselves doing too much with too little. Deficits in social support, and the perception that supervisors and employer-sponsored mental health services cannot be relied on, adds to the view of a stressful and alienating workplace. As findings suggest that there is little to be done at selection to identify more robust candidates, the focus should be on ameliorating negative workplace demands and especially on the identification of those factors feeding perceptions of not being supported.

ABSTRACT

Responses from 339 Canadian paramedics on the Big Five personality indices showed them to be significantly higher in conscientiousness, extraversion, and agreeableness, but lower in open-mindedness and negative emotionality, than normative samples. Moreover, although more likely than most to utilize a full range of coping strategies, participants reported more stress and less perceived social support, as well as a reluctance to reach out to supervisors or to access employer-sponsored support programmes in times of need. A regression analysis showed negative emotionality to be the best predictor of perceived stress followed by less-useful coping strategies and, in an inverse direction, social support.

KEYWORDS:

• Emergency responders
• first responders
• occupational culture
• occupational stress
• paramedics
• post-traumatic stress