Impact Of Isolation On Perceived Stress Of The Security Guards

The private security sector is strongly individualized through a series of inherent risks, with the tendecy to become potential stressors for the security guard. For obvious reasons, there is a high risk of physical agression in the sector, even if it’s difficult to assess how probable or dangerous the risk is in advance. Characteristics of guarding activities in an isolated area can generate negative psychological states like fear, vulnerability, boredom and insecurity. The isolated security guard is always subjected to an increased danger, and, being aware of that, is working under a great psychological strain. This study aims to identify potential triggers of stress in the security sector, by developing an organizational tool adapted to the security sector and its results will contribute to a better understanding of stress in the private securitiy sector. The general hypothesis is that in the same professional category, the characteristics of the workplace leads to different levels of perceived stress and stressors responsible for it. Thus, stressors related to security activities differ depending on the isolation criteria, and stress levels of the security isolated guards are expected to be higher than those from areas with fluctuation of people. Method: questionnaire Cohen & Williamson (for perceived stress) and guarding stress questionnaire built by the author, called SSSP. Tools: the participants were 40 security staff, divided into two groups, balanced by the criteria of the isolation degree (isolated/ not isolated), age, type of shift work, length of employment and marital status. The results: analyzing the normal distribution of dates, I used both t Test and the nonparametric Mann-U test for independent groups. The result of p