1c. Assessing the job satisfaction among correctional officers
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?
Because the use of multiple t-tests on the same sample increases the possibility of committing Type I error, ANOVA will be used to statistically assess the differences between groups in each research question.
Camp, S. D., Gaes, G. G., and Saylor, W. G. (2001). Quality of Prison Operations in the U. S. Federal Sector: A Comparison With a Private Prison. Delivered at the 2000 American Society of Criminology Meeting, San Francisco, California. Available on-lin...