Date of Award

12-2023

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Degree Discipline

Juvenile Justice

Abstract

The empirical literature has identified that school law enforcement officers respond to youth based on their training, personal feelings, emotions, and social-psychological reactions. Therefore, the perspectives that shape school law enforcement officers' feelings, emotions, and social-psychological reactions are vital to understanding their use of discretion as they interact with youth in a school setting. This study utilized an exploratory descriptive research design via survey to examine school law enforcement officers' perspectives of youth, the training received, their stress and emotional regulation.

School law enforcement officers were selected using systematic sampling after compiling a list of all the school districts in this southern state and selecting every 10th school district out of 1,026 school districts on the list. Surveys were distributed by contacting the school district's superintendent. A total of five superintendents granted permission to proceed forward. Police chiefs of the districts were contacted and distributed the surveys among the officers. A sample of 132 police officer participants were included in the study.

A hierarchical regression was conducted to address research questions: (1) How do law enforcement officers in schools describe their interactions with school-aged youth? (2) How do law enforcement officers in schools describe their perception of legitimacy based on their interactions with school-aged youth? (3) How do law enforcement officers in schools’ stress and emotional regulation contribute to the officers' self-reported interaction with school-aged youth? The results of the hierarchical regression analysis revealed that there was a positive interaction among school law enforcement officers and school-aged youth because a majority of the participants had a meaningful and pleasant experience with school-aged youth. The result also revealed that there was a positive relationship between law enforcement officers in schools’ perceptions of legitimacy and self-reported procedural justice with school-aged youth. On the contrary, there was not a positive relationship between high stress and low emotional regulation among law enforcement officers in schools and self-reported negative perceptions of school aged youth. The information provided allows for a better understanding of law enforcement and school-aged youth interactions and helps to provide the fields of juvenile justice, criminal justice and law enforcement with factors that could contribute to interactions between the two groups.

Keywords: youth, law enforcement, interaction, legitimacy, perception

Committee Chair/Advisor

Myrna Cintron

Committee Co-Chair:

Camille Gibson

Committee Member

Nabil Ouassini

Committee Member

Yuki Shigemoto

Publisher

Prairie View A&M University

Rights

© 2021 Prairie View A & M University

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Date of Digitization

1-09-2024

Contributing Institution

John B Coleman Library

City of Publication

Prairie View

MIME Type

Application/PDF

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