Personality and hardiness differences between Norwegian police and psychology students

Abstract

The present study investigated: (1) differences in personality traits and hardiness between police and psychology students; and (2) the relationship between personality traits and hardiness. To achieve these aims, we obtained scores using the Big Five Inventory-20 and the Dispositional Resilience Scale-15-R from n = 125 police students and n = 177 psychology students. Police students relative to psychology students, as expected, scored significantly higher on extraversion, conscientiousness, and emotional stability, and lower on openness. Further, the police students scored higher than psychology students on agreeableness, which was unexpected. For hardiness, police students also scored significantly higher than the psychology students. There was, however, no significant difference for the hardiness component of control. All Big Five traits (except agreeableness) predicted hardiness in a stepwise regression, where emotional stability was the strongest isolated predictor (β = 0.40). When treating hardiness as a dichotomized variable, for identifying those especially low or high on hardiness, openness was the strongest predictor for the high hardiness group: OR = 1.69 (95% CI 1.24-2.30). Margin plots revealed that increases in Big Five trait scores, except agreeableness, elevated the probability of belonging to the high hardiness group independent of field of study. We conclude that there is some support for a Norwegian 'police student personality'. Additionally, we discuss nuances in the personality-relatedness of the hardiness construct based on results from a linear and logistic regression, respectively.

Keywords: Big five; hardiness; personality; police students.