Conceptual and methodological issues in the investigation of occupational stress. A case study of police officers deployed on body recovery at the site of the Lockerbie air crash

This paper presents data from a case study of the 25 police officers comprising the Victim Recovery and Identification Team (VRIT) of the Metropolitan Police Service who were deployed at the site of the Lockerbie air crash in 1988. The purpose in presenting this case study is to review some of the conceptual and methodological issues identified in recent literature on stress amongst police officers. It looks at the distinction between stress and post‐traumatic stress and finds the distinction blurred. It considers the problems associated with gaining access to personally and professionally sensitive issues within the cultural context of police work and concludes that qualitative methods of research add an important dimension which is often missed by survey techniques. The implications are that we are more likely to under‐estimate rather than over‐estimate the incidence of stress amongst police officers.