‘Gun! Gun! Gun!’: An exploration of law enforcement officers’ decision-making and coping under stress during actual events

Harris, K.R.; Eccles, D.W.; Freeman, C.; Ward, P.

doi:10.1080/00140139.2016.1260165

‘Gun! Gun! Gun!’: An exploration of law enforcement officers’ decision-making and coping under stress during actual events

Harris, K.R.; Eccles, D.W.; Freeman, C.; Ward, P.

Authors

K.R. Harris

D.W. Eccles

C. Freeman

P. Ward

Abstract

Research on decision-making under stress has mainly involved laboratory-based studies with few contextual descriptions of decision-making under stress in the natural ecology. We examined how police officers prepared for, coped with and made decisions under threat-of-death stress during real events. A delayed retrospective report method was used to elicit skilled police officers’ thoughts and feelings during attempts to resolve such events. Reports were analysed to identify experiences of stress and coping, and thought processes underpinning decision-making during the event. Officers experienced a wide range of events, coped with stress predominantly via problem-focused strategies, and adapted their decision-making under stress based on the available context. Future officer training should involve a greater variety of training scenarios than is involved in current training, and expose trainees to the possible variants of each situation to foster better situational representation and, thus, a more reliable and adaptive mental model for use in decision-making.

Citation

Harris, K., Eccles, D., Freeman, C., & Ward, P. (2017). ‘Gun! Gun! Gun!’: An exploration of law enforcement officers’ decision-making and coping under stress during actual events. Ergonomics, 60(8), 1112-1122. https://doi.org/10.1080/00140139.2016.1260165

Journal Article Type	Article
Acceptance Date	Nov 8, 2016
Online Publication Date	Nov 30, 2016
Publication Date	Aug 3, 2017
Deposit Date	Jun 29, 2017
Publicly Available Date	Nov 30, 2017
Journal	Ergonomics
Print ISSN	0014-0139
Electronic ISSN	1366-5847
Publisher	Taylor and Francis Group
Peer Reviewed	Peer Reviewed
Volume	60
Issue	8
Pages	1112-1122
DOI	https://doi.org/10.1080/00140139.2016.1260165

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Copyright Statement
This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Ergonomics on 30/11/2016, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/00140139.2016.1260165.