Behavioral observation4/10/2023 ![]() In the end, it is the quality of behavior (i.e., decisions and skill execution) of officers that best shows psychological competence on the job, for instance, when having to perform under threatening and stressful circumstances. Although theoretically and methodologically grounded, a fundamental question with this approach is whether the assessment of pure constructs has predictive value for psychological competence as required in practice. For numerous reasons (including ease of administration and interpretation), psychological competence is picked apart into separate psychological constructs (pure constructs) that can be measured by questionnaires and self-reports. However, in current police practice, assessment of psychological competencies is rather reductionistic. It would thus be important to test and train psychological competencies of police officers. Psychological competence enables police officers to cope with stressful situations and make decisions and act under pressure ( Nieuwenhuys and Oudejans, 2012, 2017). Psychological competence can be presumed to be an integration of multiple competencies ( Fouad et al., 2009) and can be conceptualized as the knowledge, skills, and attitudes that police officers must possess to navigate the increasing psychological demands of their job. ![]() Psychological competence is important for the professional performance of police officers (e.g., Blum, 2000 Broomé, 2014 Andersen et al., 2015 van der Meulen et al., 2018). We hope this paper offers police organizations a methodology to perform scientifically informed observational behavior assessment of their police officers’ psychological competencies and inspires additional research efforts into this important area. We posit that direct behavioral observation can be key in measuring the expression of psychological competence in practice, and that psychological competence in practice is what police organizations should care about. We illustrate the proposed methodology with a practical example. We outline a step-by-step methodology for police organizations to measure and evaluate behavior in a meaningful way to assess these competencies. This paper proposes and showcases a methodology to develop an observational behavior assessment instrument to assess psychological competencies of police officers.
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