SPECIFICITY OF COPING STRATEGIES AMONG COMBATANT POLICE OFFICERS WITH DIFFERENT LEVELS OF PSYCHOLOGICAL RESOURCEFULNESS

Abstract

The article presents the results of an empirical study of the relationship between the level of psychological resourcefulness of police officers – participants in hostilities, and the strategies of their coping behaviour. It is noted that the official functioning of police officers in wartime is associated with their performance of a number of professional duties that were not inherent in them in peacetime. Police officers fight in consolidated units, participate in combat operations, detention and neutralization of enemy sabotage groups, demine territories, evacuate the population, record and investigate numerous war crimes, conduct investigative actions with the bodies of dead and tortured citizens of Ukraine. All this requires extraordinary psychological stability, the presence of a high level of psychological resources. Resourcefulness is considered in the work as one of the indicators of a person’s psychological flexibility, which consists in the ability of a person to find maximum opportunities in any situation; as the main indicator of the ability of an individual to fully and effectively use their own internal reserves for successful professional functioning. In the course of the conducted empirical research, it was found that the level of psychological resourcefulness of law enforcement officers is directly related to the nature of their coping behaviour. With high resourcefulness, constructive, socially oriented coping strategies prevail and the use of impulsive, aggressive and unique forms of behaviour decreases. The average level of resourcefulness is accompanied by instability of coping strategies and a combination of adaptive and maladaptive models. With low resourcefulness, coping behaviour is compensatory in nature and more often includes aggressive and manipulative actions. The results obtained confirm the significant role of psychological resourcefulness in ensuring effective service adaptation of law enforcement officers.