Difficult social encounters: police officers' feeling of preparedness and investigating VR as a training method

Police officers need hard skills and soft skill during their work. Adequate soft skills are essential for a police officer because they use them during most of their time working, they can prevent unnecessary use of force and they influence the public perception of police quality. Feedback is less objective for soft skills training and real interactions are too complex to simulate in a classroom. Virtual Reality (VR) soft skills training might be able to create a more realistic training environment. The first part of the study used a survey to research police officers’ feeling of preparedness for different incidents. It was expected that police officers feel more prepared for incidents requiring hard skills compared to incidents requiring soft skills. In the second part of the study, participants tried out two VR empathy simulations and answered questionnaires about their experience. It was expected that the simulations were able to induce empathy towards the protagonist in police...Show morePolice officers need hard skills and soft skill during their work. Adequate soft skills are essential for a police officer because they use them during most of their time working, they can prevent unnecessary use of force and they influence the public perception of police quality. Feedback is less objective for soft skills training and real interactions are too complex to simulate in a classroom. Virtual Reality (VR) soft skills training might be able to create a more realistic training environment. The first part of the study used a survey to research police officers’ feeling of preparedness for different incidents. It was expected that police officers feel more prepared for incidents requiring hard skills compared to incidents requiring soft skills. In the second part of the study, participants tried out two VR empathy simulations and answered questionnaires about their experience. It was expected that the simulations were able to induce empathy towards the protagonist in police officers. It was also expected that self-reported presence predicts how police officers rate the effectivity of the training. Although results show that participants indicated to feel more prepared for incidents requiring hard skills, participants mostly mentioned that soft skills should be better prepared. This contradiction is possibly caused by a relationship between the work experience of the participants and their feeling of preparedness. The VR simulations were unable to induce empathy and no relationship was found between self-reported presence and the effectivity of the training. Future research should investigate the feeling of preparedness of recently graduated police officers. More research is needed into the effectiveness of VR empathy training. Learning more about police officers’ feeling of preparedness and the effectivity of VR contributes to the soft skill adequacy of police officers and possibly other professional fields.Show less

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Difficult social encounters: police officers' feeling of preparedness and investigating VR as a training method