Psychosemantic research of the professional image of law enforcement officers

Abstract

It is stated that in recent years, in civil society and legal science there has been growing interest regarding the problem of the police officer’s image in the social conscience. Many scientific articles devoted to this theme have been published, where such issues as forming the police officer’s image in the mass media, appreciating the police activity by civil society, searching for ways of forming the positive police officer’s image, etc. are of special interest. This scientific research was aimed at appreciating the peculiarities of perceiving the professional image of law enforcement officers. In the course of the research 92 police officers were interviewed through filling the anonymous questionnaire in google-forms. Trainees of the management faculties and postgraduates of the scientific-pedagogic personnel training faculty of the Academy of Management of the MIA of Russia were the research participants. The data collection was accomplished by means of filling the google-forms. The research was conducted in anonymous format. It was stated that the application of the psychosemantic approach allowed to obtain more reliable information from the respondents than the methods of direct questions. The data were collected over the period from April to June 2020. The semantic field containing 828 words was obtained by means of applying the method of free associations to the incentive “image of law enforcement officers”. The obtained associations were classified into some semantic groups. Such service as https://облакослов.рф was used for selecting the largest semantic units. It allowed to visualize the most frequently used associations (100 of them) in the form of “word cloud”. The research results identifted the key importance of such words as “law”, “responsible”, “honest”, “to protect”, “to help” and others when characterizing both the image and professional activities of police officers.
 Conclusions: 1) the application of the psychosemantic approach in the research of the professional image allowed to study the representation of law enforcement officers; 2) the activities of the law enforcement units responsible for moral and psychological training are considered as effective since the professional image of law enforcement officers is formed from the semantic markers of positive connotation, reflecting their functions related to law protecting and ensuring security and social health.
 The study was carried out with the financial support of the Russian Foundation for Basic Research within the framework of scientific project No. 20-013-00423.