Analysis of the psychometric characteristics of the experimental psychological methods for examination of the law enforcement officers
Authors: Omelyanovich Vitaliy 
Published: September 2017

Background

As a number of local documents requires continuous improvement of psychodi-agnostic work, one of the main activities of the Internal Affairs Agencies psychi-atric service is an active clinical examination, the timely detection of law en-forcement officers employees with neuropsychological instability, tendency to aggression and other forms of deviant behavior.

Methods

The aim of the study was the selection of additional experimental psychological techniques to conduct psychological examinations of law enforcement officers. As on objective of a study evaluation of reliability, validity and discriminative level of psychological tests has been chosen. The object of study was a group of the randomly selected representatives of almost all the major police professions, consisting of 348 respondents of the male gender in the age from 21 to 48 years old. Given the fact that the screening psychological evaluation of law enforce-ment officers during periodic psychiatric examinations is usually carried out un-der time constraints and the urgency to form an opinion immediately after the end of testing, nonprojective psychological techniques have been chosen for test-ing. These techniques, according to the scientific literature, proved their effective-ness and, in addition, are characterized by a small volume of questions and sim-plicity (largely - the dichotomous scales). Moreover, it does not require a lot of time to handle them: a methodology «Aggressive behavior» (E. P Ilyin, P. O. Ko-valev, 2001), the test «Аnxiety-Rigidity- Extravertebral» (D. Moudsli, 2002), the test «IPC-Fragebogen» (H. Levenson, 1986), the test is «MS PTSD» (NM Keane, 2001).

Results

Tests reliability was investigated by determining the consistency of their results by calculating the L. Cronbach’s coefficient α and Guttman method of splitting in half; discriminative level was determined by calculating the ratio; construct validi-ty was investigated by the exploratory factor analysis conduction. The factor loadings equal to or greater than 0,3 were considered to be sufficient, provided that the other factor loadings per item tend to zero; the criterion validity was in-vestigated by calculating the dichotomous correlation coefficient φ, and the statis-tical significance of the coefficient was determined by the distribution tables χ2 with one degree of freedom.The data achieved makes it possible to assert that law enforcement officers contingent discriminative level (δ-Ferguson = 0,88 ± 0,1) and the criterion validi-ty (φ≥0,225; r≤3E-05) of all the techniques of scales are high enough. Reliability of «Aggressive behavior» methodology is estimated as high only in relation to the general level of diagnosis of incontinence (α-Cronbach = 0,78; Guttman split-half = 0,763), whereas the reliability and construct validity of its individual scales are insufficient. Taking into account the high level of criteria validity and discrimina-tive level of this test, it is possible to talk about whether it should be used only as an indicator of the overall level of incontinence of internal affairs body employ-ees.«MS PTSD» has revealed a high level of reliability, and discriminative valid-ity (α-Cronbach = 0,67; Guttman split-half = 0,63; δ-Ferguson = 0,984), which allows to recommend its use in the process of psycho-diagnostic survey of law enforcement officers.The level of reliability and construct validity of methods «IPC-Fragebogen» and «ARE» was insufficient (α-Kronbaha≤0,5; Guttman split-half≤0,5), indicat-ing that they cannot be used in the process of psychological examinations of law enforcement officers.

Conclusion

Notwithstanding that several diagnostic instruments have proven themselves in long use in other professional contingents, an important conclusion has been ob-tained as a result of the work that the existing practice of these practices intro-duction into the activity of departmental psychological and psychiatric services without holding their quality evaluation and analysis of testing during the exami-nation of law enforcement officers should be considered unacceptable. On the contrary, the use of any psycho-diagnostic tools must be carried out only after a reasonable proof of the adequacy of their contingent’s psychometric characteris-tics, gender, socio-psychological, and, possibly, regional particularities.