Four Short Studies

Correctional officers are at high risk for stress and job burnout. Schaefuli and Peeters (2000) discovered that 50% of correctional officers leave their jobs within 10 years. Schaefuli and Peeters reviewed 43 different studies of correctional officer stress in 9 different countries. They found that low job satisfaction is a consistently strong indicator of developing stress in correctional officers.

For this study, the Prison Social Climate Survey (PSCS) will be used to collect date. The PSCS has been administered annually since 1988. It is a survey of federal correctional officers based on a stratified proportional probability sample. This study will make use of the 1999 PSCS, which consists of the responses of 10,710 correctional officers from 98 prisons ( Camp, Gaes, and Saylor, 2001).

The PSCS contains a section on job satisfaction that will be analyzed in this study. This will be exploratory level analysis that will assess the following Research Questions:

1. Are there differences in job satisfaction between male and female correctional officers?

2. Are there differences in job satisfaction between correctional officers of different ethnicities?

3. Are there differences in job satisfaction between correctional officers in different regions of the country?

4. Are there differences in job satisfaction between correctional officers in public and privately owned prisons?

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llows the researcher to make sure that the survey instrument is performing as it is intended to perform. It identifies questions that are unfocused and instructions that are unclear. Pre-testing allows the final survey instrument to be more reliable and valid. 2E. If you can afford it, there is no reason why you should not pay respondents a small fee. If you can offer $5 to $10 per completed survey, the response will be much greater than just relying on passersby to take part in your research. 2F. Sensitive questions should be kept to a minimum if they cannot be avoided. Respondents will tend to either skip over sensitive questions, or to cease participating in the study at all. 3. Validity is the concept that assures the researcher that the findings of the study are applicable to the real world. Salkind (2003) offers several synonyms for validity: "truthfulness, accuracy, authenticity, genuineness, and soundness (p. 115)." Salkind further says that there are three important things to remember when discussing validity. 1. Validity is about the results of the research, not the research instruments. 2. There are degrees of validity, it is not all or none. 3. Validity is contextual - the same item can be val
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1575
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)