Online Canadian police recruitment videos: do they focus on factors that potential employees consider when making career decisions?

ABSTRACT

Given their potential to reach a large audience, online recruitment videos are likely a useful way for police services to recruit applicants. To increase the likelihood of people applying, these videos should focus on issues potential employees consider when making career decisions. A literature review revealed six job factors that people consider when contemplating a potential career. A coding framework focusing on these factors (and their respective sub-categories) was developed and applied to all available recruitment videos created by Canadian policing organizations (N = 37). The coding dictionary could be applied reliably and it revealed that only 23% of the job factors that emerged from the literature review are addressed in the videos and when they are, they are not particularly salient. Ways of using this study to develop more effective, data-driven, police recruitment videos are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Police recruitment
• recruitment videos
• career selection
• content analysis
• job factors

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Genevieve Brook for coding the sample of recruitment videos used to conduct inter-rater reliability.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Railway policing recruitment videos were not included in the sample as none could be found online.

2. https://osf.io/3qkdp/

3. For Cohen’s kappa, values ≤ 0.20 indicate no reliability, values between 0.21–0.39 indicate minimal reliability, values between 0.40–0.59 indicate weak reliability, values between 0.60–0.79 indicate moderate reliability, values between 0.80–0.90 indicate strong reliability, and values ≥ 0.91 indicate almost perfect reliability, with a value of 1.00 indicating perfect reliability (McHugh, 2012). For ICC, values ≤ 0.5 indicate poor reliability, values between 0.5–0.75 indicate moderate reliability, values between 0.75–0.9 indicate good reliability, and values ≥ 0.90 indicate excellent reliability, with a value of 1.00 indicating perfect reliability (Koo & Li, 2016).

4. Seeing as though kappa is highly dependent on the prevalence of measured variables, and many of the sub-categories were absent from the sampled videos, this metric could not always accurately measure IRR. Prevalence-adjusted kappa reduces the penalty of chance agreements thereby providing a more accurate representation of IRR (Sim & Wright, 2005). Prevalence-adjusted kappa is measured on the same scale as kappa and interpreted the same way.

5. The results presented are the coding completed by the first author as the IRR was quite high in most cases and it was decided through discussion that the author’s coding was most accurate.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Joey Carrier

Joey Carrier, BSc is a student in the Department of Psychology at Carleton University.

Craig Bennell

Craig Bennell is a Professor of Psychology at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, where he is also the Director of the Police Research Lab. His research is typically conducted in partnership with Canadian police services and focuses on various aspects of evidence-based policing. He has a particular interest in de-escalation and use-of-force in the policing context, where his research focuses on factors that influence police decision-making and strategies for improving training in these areas. 

Tori Semple

Tori Semple is a PhD student in the Department of Psychology at Carleton University. As a member of the Police Research Lab, her research focuses on understanding and improving interactions between the police and persons in crisis. Her current research examines police use of de-escalation and the use of mobile crisis intervention teams. 

Bryce Jenkins

Bryce Jenkins is a PhD student in the Department of Psychology at Carleton University. As a member of the Police Research Lab, his research interests broadly focus on evidence-based policing. He is particularly interested in police training as it relates to use of force and de-escalation, concerns regarding police militarization, and the use of tactical teams.