RESEARCH ON CHANGES IN RESILIENCE AND AGGRESSIVENESS WITHIN THE TRAINING OF POLICE INTERVENTION TROOPS

The article introduces results of quantitative research dealing with changes in resilience and aggressive behaviour rates with police intervention troops in the Czech Republic within their period of service. The main research objective was to compare data of the troop members serving for the period shorter than one year to those being in service for more than ten years. Differences in the resilience and aggression rates were expected as a result of the systematic training of the troop members. The training consisted of several courses and included educational interventions which aimed at increasing the resilience and decreasing the aggressive behaviour. Therefore, the semilongitudinal study was conducted which focused on the effectiveness of educational interventions towards developing the required behaviour of the troop members. All Czech troop members were addressed to participate, i.e. 200 sets of research tools were distributed, 163 of them were filled in (return rate 81.5 %). This research sample consisted of 71 respondents serving for the period shorter than one year and 92 respondents being in service for the period longer than ten years.

Two standardized questionnaires were exploited:
(1) The Ego Resilience Scale designed by Block and Kremen, which considers the resilience intensity on the four-level scale, and
(2) Aggression Questionnaire by Buss and Perry, which exploits the five-level scale to measure four dimensions of aggression – physical aggression, verbal aggression, anger and hostility.

The research results discovered positive impact of educational interventions on the development of required behaviour within the training: total resilience rate significantly increased within the ten-year period of service (p = 4,217.10-4); on the other side, total aggressive behaviour rate significantly decreased (p = 1,883.10-3). Within the study particular dimensions of aggressive behaviour were also analyzed. The findings showed that as a result of educational interventions within the training courses the statistically significant decrease was discovered in two dimensions: in the dimension of physical aggression (p = 1,24.10-5) and in the anger dimension (p = 2,434.10-4); no statistically significant changes were discovered in dimensions of verbal aggression and hostility. Transformation of physical aggression into verbal aggression is highly required from the police intervention troop members; it is one of expected educational outcomes of their training. Reflecting the findings, wider consequences are discussed in the final chapter.