Perception of Personal Well-Being and Workers' Compensation Injuries in Federal Correctional Workers

摘要

Federal correctional workers are tasked with protecting society from felons convicted of federal crimes and remanded to the custody of the Attorney General for incarceration. The physical and psychological demands placed upon these workers are great, and these workers have greater risk factors for occupational injury and disease than do other federal law enforcement officers. This dissertation examines rates of occupational injuries for approximately 30, 000 federal correctional workers with regard to the security level of the prison worked in, the occupation of the correctional worker, gender, and associated number of days away from work after an occupational injury. Also analyzed is a Perception of Personal Well-Being (PWB)instrument, part of a widely circulated self-report measure of physical and emotional well-being administered to federal correctional workers on a nationwide basis. It was hypothesized that security level, and occupation, would be related to higher levels of occupational injury, lower levels of PWB, and that higher security levels would be associated with significantly lower levels of perception of personal well-being. Security level is significantly related to rates of occupational injury, in that federal correctional workers at Minimum security institutions had lower odds for the occurrence of occupational injuries than all other security levels except the AdMax security level. Security level was not a significant predictor for aggregate perception of well-being. Correctional officers had higher rates of occupational injuries than non-correctional officers. Security level was not a significant predictor of aggregate measures of PWB. Correctional officers had higher aggregate scores of PWB than non-correctional officers.