PSYCHOLOGICAL WELLBEING OF WOMAN POLICE AND ITS ASSOCIATED FACTORS IN MADURAI DISTRICT, TAMIL NADU

Abstract

Generally, psychological well-being (PW) of police in general and police women in particular, is largely affected by work-related factors, besides their personal characteristics. In fact, a fewer researches have been made on this topic in the Indian context. Keeping this in mind, here, the researchers took an effort to measure the PW and its associated factors of 278 individual police women (who were selected based on stratified proportionate and simple random sampling methods) working in Madurai district of Tamil Nadu. The PW was measured based on the sub-scale (14 items) of the Mental Health Inventory – 38. Data were collected through structured-questionnaire and analysed into frequency tables, cross-tabulations (means, standard deviations, and One-way ANOVA / t-test), and step-wise regression analysis. The results revealed that, overall, the mean PW score of sample woman police was noted as 41.33±10.50 (Range: 17–69). Results of step-wise regression analysis highlighted that six variables/factors collectively had explained about 21.6% variation in PW. The likelihood of PW of police women was positively associated with their years of schooling (p<0.01), monthly family income (p<0.001), and also of those who were living in a joint family environment (p<0.01). Conversely, such probability of PW appeared to be lessening among those who were reported as facing more problems while working at outside police stations (p<0.001) and working for more number of hours/day (p<0.01); whereas, such well-being was observed as much lower among those who were working in ‘general’ police stations as against All Women Stations (p<0.001). Police women’s monthly income, current department (or wing) in which working, the average number of days/month on night duty, number of transfers had by request, and the number of police wellbeing programmes attended were also found to be associated with their PW. Suitable suggestions were put forwarded for enhancing psychological wellbeing among women police.