Occupational
Mixtures Effect of Police Stressors on Psychological Health, a Machine Learning Approach Ja Kook Gu* Ja Gu Erin McCanlies John Violanti Anna Mnatsakanova Samantha Services Penelope Allison Luenda E. Charles
Objective: Police officers often experience high stress levels due to occupational exposures that negatively impact their psychological health. This study utilized Bayesian Kernel Machine Regression (BKMR) to investigate the associations between multiple police stressors and psychological health.
Methods: Data were obtained from 315 officers (216 men) participating in the Buffalo Cardio-Metabolic Occupational Police Stress Study 2004–2009. Eight stressors were analyzed as predictors: night shifts, afternoon shifts, sleep quality, administrative stress, lack of support, physical threat, vital exhaustion (VE), and work exposures index. Psychological health score (PHS) as the outcome variable was measured as the sum of the scores from Beck Anxiety Inventory and Beck Depression Inventory. We examined the relationship between the stressors and PHS adjusted for covariates, stratified by sex. The contribution of individual stressor to the PHS was measured with the change in PHS for interquartile change in a stressor. Posterior inclusion probabilities (PIPs, range: 0-1) measure the relative importance of each stressor with higher values being more important.
Results: When all other stressors were fixed at 50th percentile, the strongest stressor(s) associated with PHS was VE (estimate=1.12; 95% credible interval=0.38-1.51) among women and VE (0.47; 0.14-0.80) and administrative stress (0.77; 0.51-1.04) among men. The stressors showing the highest importance in the associations were also supported by the PIPs: PIP=1.000 for VE among women; PIP=1.000 for both VE and administrative stress, followed by PIP=0.796 for sleep quality among men.
Conclusions: We identified VE and administrative stress as strong factors in the association between occupational stressors and PHS in male officers, while VE was the primary stressor for female officers. These findings highlight the benefits of analyzing combined occupational exposures to better understand officers’ psychological health.