Chinese police cadets' attitudes toward police roles revisited

Abstract

Purpose

- The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between Chinese police cadets' background, motivations and educational perceptions and their attitudes toward common police roles.

Design/methodology/approach

- Self-administered questionnaires were collected from 382 Chinese police cadets. Based upon predisposition and socialization theories, personal background, career motivation and attitudes toward education were examined as statistical explanations of cadets' attitudes toward order maintenance, preventative patrol, law enforcement, and community building as elements of the police role.

Findings

- Cadets who recognized more value in their practical and academic education also significantly favored the transitional and contemporary police roles (preventative patrol, law enforcement, and community building), which are taught as part of their college curriculum. But educational perceptions had no effect on order maintenance, which is a more historical role, and not emphasized by the police college. Cadets from lower SES backgrounds and those receiving outside influence to select a policing career tended to support traditional police roles whereas cadets with a relative in policing tended to show greater support for contemporary policing roles.

Research limitations/implications

- This study is limited by being a cross-sectional study of a single police college. Future studies should incorporate a longitudinal element to follow the perceptions of cadets from their school experience into the policing profession and should be conducted in other settings to assess generalizability.

Practical implications

- The impact of higher education on police cadets appears to be better measured as a function of their perceived importance of education (engagement) rather than measuring their exposure to it. The effectiveness of police training and education may be enhanced by adopting teaching methods that better engage learners.

Social implications

- Better alignment between police officers' attitudes toward their roles and duties and contemporary police standards and practices will assure more effective and responsible police action and delivery of police services to the community.

Originality/value

- This study is among the first to demonstrate that Cadets who hold higher regard for practical and academic education are significantly better aligned to the policing roles emphasized by their educational program.

Introduction and literature review

Policing in a dynamic society requires law enforcement officers and organizations to adapt to change. Patterson (2011) notes, "It is acknowledged across the globe that traditional policing functions have extended beyond the role of peace-keeping and law enforcement to incorporate problem-solving, technological innovations, transnational crime and prevention strategies." Yet, while most modern police organizations have raised their standards for police training and education, questions of the effectiveness of efforts to transform policing practice remain. At the heart of this issue lies the recognition that attitudes impact learning outcomes. Sherman (1978) suggests that police education should precede entry into the profession as the occupational perspectives learned by in-service officers tend to moderate the impact of education. Learning outcomes have been linked to attitudes that trainees bring to their education and training, which impact the level to which they internalize professional roles (Zedeck et al. , 1981; Phillips et al. , 2010). The purpose of this study is to expand the relationship between Chinese police cadets' backgrounds, motivations, and valuation of their education and their attitudes toward policing roles by building upon Sun et al. (2009) study of Chinese police cadets.

Two general theories have been proffered as explanations of attitudes toward policing roles. The occupational attitudes perspective that cadets/trainees bring into their professional training has been labeled "predisposition theory" (Roberg et al. , 2000; Sun and Payne, 2004). By contrast, the differential socialization/experience theory views attitudes as shaped by experiences in profession or training (Roberg et al. , 2000). Oberfield (2012) references these perspectives as "self-selection" and "socialization." These two perspectives make an interesting parallel with other subject areas. For example, the "importation" and "deprivation" models used to explain prison behavior (Delisi et al. , 2010; McCorkle et al ., 1995; Richards, 2007) also defines inmate predispositions for violence brought into the prison setting and the effects of prisonization on provoking violent behavior.

Chinese police cadets' attitudes toward police roles and practices have not been the subject of much empirical research. The most notable study to date was conducted by Sun et al. 's (2009), which applied importation and socialization concepts in examining the attitudes of Chinese police cadets toward four general police roles. The resulting models provided weak statistical support explaining between 6 and 12 percent of the total variation among cadets and produced no statistically significant model explaining cadets' level of support for order maintenance, preventative patrol, law enforcement, or community building.

While police officers perform many functions and play numerous roles, there are points in time in which the underlying policing philosophy emphasizes certain functions over others. Emphasis on order maintenance, preventative patrol, law enforcement, and community building can be associated with Chinese policing eras. From 1949 to 1978 "the core missions of the police were to [quell] resistance, dissent, and industrial sabotage [...] and to support mass political campaigns" (Sun and Wu, 2010, p. 23). The primary police mission was maintaining public order. Thus, the order maintenance role can be seen as historically based in mass line policing practices (Sun and Wu, 2010, p. 24).

In the post-cultural revolution period (1978-2001), policing strategies shifted from "the static administration of the registration system to the dynamic management of public security on the streets" (Fu, 1990), in which there was "increased reliance on preventative patrol and rapid response [...] in preventing and fighting crime" (Dutton, 2005; Zhong, 2009). While preventative patrol is still practiced in China, greater use of closed circuit television monitoring and crime prevention through community-oriented policing is reducing emphasis on this role. Preventative patrol is therefore considered to be transitional.

With economic growth following opening to foreign markets in the late 1970s, crime in China also steadily increased (Cao and Dai, 2001; Liu, 2005). Police responded by several "Strike Hard" campaigns, which targeted specific types of crime (Tanner, 2005) the last of which took place in 2012 (Dammer and Albanese, 2014, p. 83). Criminal law and procedure has gone through reforms in 1979, and 1997 as China continues to strengthen the rule of law (Dammer and Albanese, 2014, p. 85). With these legal changes, law enforcement reforms have been enacted, including increased accountability for police officers, improvements in police education and training, establishment of higher education programs, and an increase in college-educated first-line supervisors and administrators (Sun and Wu, 2010, p. 27). Through these reforms, law enforcement has been strengthened and updated and remains a contemporary Chinese role of a professionalized police force.

In 2002, the Minister of Public Security officially announced community policing as a nation-wide strategy and requested it to be implemented within two years by large and mid-sized departments (Zhong, 2009). Community policing has showed continued strengthening of community-level crime prevention and control with enhanced information technology and communications (Sun and Wu, 2010, p. 28). Community policing is clearly a contemporary policing role in China at the present time.

Emphasis on education accompanied the move toward community policing in China. Yet, higher education's association with police attitude and behavior is still unsettled (Fekjær, 2014). While some associations were found between a variety of soft skills (Fekjær, 2014), Sun et al. (2009) reported no association between Cadets with or without a college degree and their attitudes toward order maintenance, preventative patrol, law enforcement, and community policing. The question of whether higher education actually impacts the police quality or effectiveness remains open (Wimshurst and Ransley, 2007).

According to Sun et al. (2009), cadets are likely to have similar attitudes toward police roles and practices and the importance of cadets' social backgrounds are not significant. Sun et al. 's (2009) findings suggest that: being related to a police officer and physical capability to do police work were negatively and positively associated with the law enforcement role, respectively; physical capability was negatively associated with order maintenance; age and college graduate status were negatively associated with preventative patrol; and the desire to serve the community was positively associated with support for the community building role.

Methodology

Variable selection

Background variables in the present study matched those reported by Sun et al. (2009), motivation variables were expanded, and educational perceptions were also added. These will be discussed with the introduction of the survey instrument. Two variables were not replicated from Sun et al. 's (2009) study and these require additional explanation. The first variable concerns cadets' perception of personal physical ability and second variable is the amount of class time spent on CP training (CP training).

The relationship between the law enforcement role and cadets' perception of their personal physical capabilities presents a dilemma. While statistically significant in Sun et al. 's (2009) study, the conceptual foundation used to explain the relationship is problematic. Sun et al. (2009) suggests that physically capable officers are more likely to favor law enforcement assignments, such as detective work over more order-maintenance-oriented assignments. One certainly can imagine that detective work would be more engaging and more prestigious than maintaining order but their interpretation seems to fall short of explaining how a cadet's assessment of personal physical capability influence a their rating of the importance of a given police role. Additionally, all cadets are screened for their physical ability to perform policing tasks on admission into the police college. This is evidenced in a related article using the same data set. Wu and Cretacci (2009) report that 86.3 percent of the physical capability distribution was evenly split between "agree strongly" and "agree somewhat," with 11 percent disagreeing somewhat and 2.7 percent disagreeing strongly. The significant finding could be an artifact of the data distribution. In the end, the variable's significance, though high, was not sufficient to produce a significant model, which calls into question both the conceptual and statistical utility of physical ability in explaining cadets' attitudes toward police roles.

Another variable that was not included in the present study was Sun et al. 's (2009) CP. This variable measured how many hours of CP training cadets recall receiving in the course of their studies at the police college. While potentially interesting, the variable showed no significance with respect to any of the four policing roles in Sun et al. 's (2009) study. Furthermore, with a sample of only second year students, the present study would not objectively attain a degree of variation between students as individual majors would not have received more or less exposure to policing roles at this point in the cadets' education.

Data collection

The data were collected from the same college as the study undertaken by Sun et al. (2009). The College is recognized as one of top provincial police colleges in China and also provides provincial, national and international programs for continuing education and training of in-service police officers.

Data collection was conducted by the college administration and permission was granted to the authors for its use in this study. Anonymous surveys were distributed to second year police college student volunteers and were administered by assembling the students in two groups, seating the students under exam conditions, and administering the surveys.

A total of 385 completed questionnaires were collected from a stratified sample representing six majors. From the standard four-year college degree program, 31 surveys were completed by students studying international policing cooperation; 48 by students studying order maintenance; 23 surveys were collected from students studying traffic control; 18 surveys were collected from students studying anti-terrorism; 22 by public security intelligence students and 81 by cadets who had not declared a major. A total of 192 surveys were also collected from cadets in a pilot program who had already received college degrees and had enrolled in a two-year program to receive police officer certification.

The survey instrument

The survey instrument was a Chinese language questionnaire consisting 48 items organized into five parts. Part 1 consisted of 20 questions and covered the reasons why the respondent had chosen policing as a profession. Part 2 consisted of five questions which probed cadets' perceptions of order maintenance as a policing priority. Part 3 included ten questions which asked cadets to prioritize a set of policing goals. Part 4 addressed cadets' opinions on six educational and training priorities. Finally, Part 5 collected demographic and social background information on respondents.

Measures

In order to replicate the findings reported by Sun et al. (2009), this study initially followed their procedures as closely as possible in forming the measurements. Four dependent variables were constructed from survey items to measure student attitudes oriented toward law enforcement, order maintenance, preventative patrol, and community building. Table I summarizes the factor analysis from which law enforcement, order maintenance, and community building were formed.

An order maintenance orientation was derived from four items concerned with the frequency with which police officers should respond to the following types of issues: public nuisances (e.g. loud noises); neighborhood disputes; family disputes; and illegal dumping. Reliability assessed seeking a Cronbach's [alpha] equal to 0.731, suggesting an acceptable reliability. A factor analysis explained about 59 percent of the variance across these four variables as a single factor. The loadings of the factor ranged from 0.712 to 0.826. Order maintenance is associated with older style police practices that have been incorporated into law enforcement and community building. The policy relevance for order maintenance for this study will be considered "historical."

A preventative patrol orientation was measured by a single item in which cadets were asked to rate the importance of "performing preventative patrol in assigned areas." The response categories included: most important scored equal to 1; important scored equal to 2; somewhat important scored equal to 3; not important scored equal to 4; least important scored equal to 5. Preventative patrol is being increasingly supplemented with surveillance cameras that are strategically placed in public areas and is incorporated into more contemporary policing roles and its policy relevance is considered "transitional."

A law enforcement orientation was measured by the respondents' rated level of importance to three items: making arrests; seizing drugs, guns, and other contraband; curbing theft, burglary, and fraud. The response categories included five items, scored ranging for 1-5 (1=most important, 2=important, 3=somewhat important; 4=not important; 5=least important). The scale had a Cronbach's [alpha] of 0.654, suggesting the reliability is acceptable. A factor analysis is undertaken that explained 59 per cent of the variance across these four variables in a single factor. The coefficients of three items was 0.765 (making arrests), 0.740 (seizing drugs, guns, and other contraband), 0.807 (curbing theft, burglary, and fraud). A lower score on the scale indicated a stronger orientation toward law enforcement. The law enforcement role in China is presently being updated and framed within the rule of law and is considered a "contemporary" role for this study.

A community building orientation was measured by a scale which includes three items: getting the public involved in improving the neighborhood; enhancing citizens' knowledge of crime prevention; assisting citizens. The response categories were scored from 1 to 5 (1=most important; 2=important; 3=somewhat important; 4=not important 5=least important). Factor analysis results showed that the loadings ranged from 0.802 to 0.837 and explained about 66 percent of variance across the items in a single factor. The Cronbach's [alpha] of this scale was 0.746, which suggested that the reliability of this scale is acceptable. The lower the respondent's score on this scale, the stronger the respondent's support for the community building role. Community building is being strongly emphasized as a current police practice in China and will be considered "contemporary" for this study.

Background variables include the cadets' gender and family socio-economic status. In present study, Gender was measured as categorical variable (1=male, 2=female). Having a college degree (college) and having a family member or relative is/was a police officer (relative a police officer) were both dummy coded (1=yes, 2=no). The variable of family socio-economic status was measured by factoring three items: "father's education level," "mother's education level" and "parents' combined monthly income." The father/mother education level was ranged from 1 which indicates illiteracy, to 6 which indicates college degree and above. Parent's combined monthly income was measured in six categories: 1=under 1,000; 2=1,000-3,000; 3=3,000-6,000; 4=6,000-10,000; 5=10,000-20,000; 6=above 20,000. The Cronbach's [alpha] of this scale is 0.718, suggesting acceptable validity. The coefficients of items range from 0.653 to 0.869 (see Table II).

Sun et al. (2009) used two items which were "the chance to fight crime" and "enforcing the law" to represent the variable "job motivation." The present survey provided 19 possible motivations for respondents choosing a law enforcement as their career. Principle components factor analysis identified five distinct components with eigenvalues of 1 or greater. Those five distinct components, as shown in Table II, are labeled "Outside Influence"; "Protect and Serve"; "Economics"; "authority" and "no other choice." The Cronbach's [alpha] showed that each component had high reliability (outside influence [alpha] =0.869, protect and serve [alpha] =0.838; economics [alpha] =0.865, authority [alpha] =0.830, and no choice [alpha] =0.701).

Cadets' perception of their educational experience was measured as a scale constructed from a principal components analysis of five items where respondents were asked to rate the importance of: paying attention to the study of basic courses to cultivate basic literacy; paying attention to the study of police professional work to master policing skills; using the practical training and teaching methods to enhance practical ability; using traditional speculative teaching methods to cultivate ideation; paying attention to interactive and independent educational methods to stimulate students' learning. The responses to these items were categorized into four levels with the scores ranging from 1 to 4: 1: most important, 2: a little important, 3: less important, and 4: least important. The five items formed two components. The first component consists of three items related to professional work, practical training and interactive/independent educational methods. This scale, named "Practical Education" and Cronbach's [alpha] is 0.629 and the single factor explains 60.4 percent of the total variation. The second scale consists of three items related to studying basic courses, using traditional teaching methods, and interactive/independent educational methods and is called "academic education," and Cronbach's [alpha] is 0.607 and explains 56.1 percent of the total variation. Cronbach's [alpha] in both cases indicates that the reliability of this scale is acceptable (see Table II).

Analysis

Preliminary examination of the data revealed that the four policing roles and many independent variables were skewed, with preliminary analysis showing substantial deviations from assumptions of bivariate normality for order maintenance, law enforcement and community building, which would be subject to OLS regression analysis. Preventative patrol, was also heavily skewed with 83 percent of the responses falling into "agree strongly" and "agree somewhat." In order to produce more stable results, preventative patrol was dichotomized with "agree strongly" as one category and all other responses belonging to the other category and bivariate logistic regression is used to analyze this model.

Preliminary analysis also showed that assumptions of bivariate normality were not well supported by the data. Bootstrapping was applied to all models as a method of remediating the problem of heteroscedastic error:

Bootstrapping is a method for deriving robust estimates of standard errors and confidence intervals for estimates such as the mean, median, proportion, odds ratio, correlation coefficient or regression coefficient. It may also be used for constructing hypothesis tests. Bootstrapping is most useful as an alternative to parametric estimates when the assumptions of those methods are in doubt (as in the case of regression models with heteroscedastic residuals fit to small samples) (IBM SPSS Version 2000, 2011).

Bootstrapping techniques applied in the following analyses were based upon drawing 1,000 random samples from the existing data. This technique produced empirical standard error distributions with a mean of 0 and negligible estimation bias.

The relations between dependent variables and independent variables were analyzed in three blocks. Analyses was conducted in a hierarchical, fashion, with the background variables as the first block, motivation variables in the second block, and a third block included educational perceptions.

Results

The descriptive statistics for all variables applied in present study are presented in Table III. Three surveys were dropped due to missing values, leaving 382 valid surveys. The average age of those cadets are 22 with a range from 18 to 29. Among them, 162 students making up 42.4 percent are part of the pilot program. There are 59 female cadets and 323 male cadets in the total sample.

For three latent variables - order maintenance, law enforcement, and community building the raw values of the items in each scale is summed to provide descriptive summaries. When applied in the regression models, the standardized factor scores are applied. The means of the summed scores are 8.16 (order maintenance); 3.40 (Law Enforcement); and 4.01 (community building). The average scores fell somewhat below or near the midpoints for each of the three distributions. The mean score for preventative patrol is 1.02. Table III summarizes the descriptive statistics.

The first set of regression models shows the entry of background and motivations as blocks of independent variables. Table IV summarizes the findings from the first set of regression models, which approximates the results reported by Sun et al. (2009).

For the order maintenance role the present study shows Family SES (-0.179, p <0.001), Outside Influence (0.284, p <0.001), Authority (0.135, p <0.05) and No Other Choice (0.114, p <0.05) to be significant with R 2=0.194 (p <0.001). The lower the family's socio-economic status, and the greater the Motivations of Outside Influence, Authority, and No Other Choice, the higher cadets tend to prioritize order maintenance.

The Preventative Patrol model shows that males and protect and serve to be significant. Male cadets, tend prioritize preventative patrol (1.252, p <0.05) more than females, all else being equal. The higher the motivation to protect and serve the higher priority cadets tend to place on preventative patrol (0.416, p <0.05). This model is of questionable value, however, as it produces a non-significant pseudo R 2 value of 0.089.

The Law Enforcement model shows significance for protect and serve (0.134, p <0.05) and no other choice (-0.164, p <0.01), which indicates that the more cadets agree that they are motivated to protect and serve the community and the less cadets agree that they had no other choice of career, the more they will support the law enforcement role. The overall model fit (R 2=0.047 p <0.01), indicates that while it is significant it does not substantially predict cadets' level of support of the law enforcement function.

For the community building role, the present study shows that only "Protect and Serve," is a significant predictor (0.152, p <0.01). Cadets who are motivated by the desire to protect and serve the community show support for community building. The model is not significant, however.

With the introduction of educational perceptions block, there was only nominal change in the order maintenance model with background and motivations alone. No significant association was found between cadets' educational perceptions and their ratings of practical and academic education (see Table V).

For the other three policing roles the relationship with educational perceptions is more substantial. For preventative patrol, male remains significant (1.053, p <0.05) and positively associated with support for that role. Protect and Serve is no longer significant. Practical education (0.441, p <0.001) and academic education (0.463, p <0.001) clearly dominate the model. The more highly cadets rate the importance of their education the stronger their support for preventative patrol with the model R 2=0.180 (p <0.001).

For the law enforcement role, relative a police officer becomes significant when educational perceptions are introduced (0.297, p <0.05). This indicates that when the two educational perception variables are controlled, cadets with a relative in policing show greater support of the law enforcement role than other cadets. No Other Choice remains significant (-0.107, p <0.05) but diminished in significance from the previous model. Clearly, Educational Perceptions dominate the model (Practical Education=0.382, p <0.001; Academic Education=0.133, p <0.01) and double the explanatory power of the model (R 2=0.217, p <0.001) when compared to Table IV.

Educational Perceptions also dominates the Community Building model (Practical Education =0.348, p <0.001; Academic Education=0.160, p <0.01) with the model R 2=0.173 (p <0.001). Having a relative as a police officer raises support for Community Building (0.208, p <0.05) once Educational Perceptions are statistically controlled while the motivation to Protect and Serve (-0.124, p <0.05) becomes non-significant. This finding suggests that once educational perceptions are controlled, cadets with relatives in policing tend to rate Community Building as more important than other cadets. Cadets motivated to Protect and Serve show no significant difference from other cadets in their rating of Community Building.

Discussion

When taking just the Background and Motivation variables into account, the coefficients of determination for the four police roles approximate the findings reported by Sun et al. (2009) even though some of this study's explanatory variables differed as this study did not use physical ability but added more types of motivation. Introducing educational perceptions has negligible impact on explaining order maintenance, it doubles the explanatory power of the Preventative Patrol model, increases the explanatory power of the law enforcement model by three times and increases the community building model by five times. This discussion will posit an interpretation of the findings but with recognition that the generalizability of these results is not yet established.

Cadets from lower SES families (parents with lower education and income), who report being influenced to become police officers by others (Outside Influence), those attracted to the authority of the police (Authority), or those perceiving no better choice (No Better Choice) tend to support the historical role of order maintenance. Considering that order maintenance has been a long-standing historical police role in China, the tendency to support it suggest a more traditional or stereotypical perception of police roles. The conspicuous lack of significance between order maintenance and educational perspectives further suggests that socialization through education, as operationalized in this study, has not influenced these traditional perceptions at the time of the survey administration (almost midway through the cadets' second year). From an academic perspective, order maintenance would not be taught as a contemporary role of the police, rather, the order maintenance function would be considered a component of other police roles, such as community building. A non-significant finding with Educational Perceptions would therefore be consistent with educational goals of the police college.

Cadets who recognize greater value in their educational experience also tend to favor the transitional and contemporary policing roles (preventative patrol, law enforcement and community building). These policing roles are actively addressed in the teaching curriculum at the police college, which suggests that the cadets who place higher value on their educational experiences reflect a concordant pattern with the college curriculum.

Having a relative as a police officer, while initially showing no significant impact on attitudes toward the four police roles in Table IV, showed significance in the final model (Table V) in which students with a police officer relative tended to favor the more contemporary role of law enforcement (0.297, p <0.05) and community building (0.208, p <0.05). This suggests that when the influence of educational perceptions are controlled, cadets with relatives in policing have a more contemporary perception of police practices than those who do not have relatives in policing, which suggests importation.

With educational perceptions exerting a dominating effect on the model, other correlated independent variables lost explanatory power. This suggests that cadets with a "protect and serve" motivation, also tend to have a more positive perception of their college education, thus causing a loss of significance in Preventative Patrol and Community Building. In a reverse relationship, Outside Influence became significant in the Law Enforcement model in Table V where it was not significant in Table IV. This suggests that Educational Perceptions overcorrected prediction of support for those motivated by Outside Influence.

Limitations

This is a study of Chinese cadets in a provincial police college. At present we cannot be certain that the results reported in this study generalize to other police colleges in China or other countries. In addition, this study is limited by being a cross-sectional study and is not able to fully distinguish predispositional factors from socialization. To overcome this limitation future studies should incorporate a longitudinal element. Examining attitudes shortly after entry into the cadets' college program and then following attitude change periodically across their educational experience would more clearly differentiate and improve assignment of effects to predisposition and socialization.

Extending the longitudinal study to include data collection once subjects have entered into the profession would also be informative to assess the degree to which attitudes change once the former cadets actually begin performing police roles. Including some reflection questions on how their college experience prepared them for their profession or what learning experiences would have be helpful could prove useful to college administrators in aligning curricula.

Policy implications

Patterson (2011) observes, "The didactic approach that dominates police training for new recruits focusses upon law and procedure to the detriment of community oriented, problem-solving skills that are learnt though self-directed, interactive processes rather than a trainer acting as an authority figure." Critical thinking, creativity and problem solving are important skills for effective contemporary policing strategies and professional ethics (Brodeur, 2005; Patterson, 2011). The degree to which these skills are internalized depends upon the receptivity, or engagement, of the learners. Engagement includes the time and effort students put into educational activities and their attitudes toward these experiences (Fredricks et al. , 2004; Kuh, 2003). This study has shown that Cadets who hold a higher value on their learning experiences also show greater internalization of their college curriculum. Educators should seek to apply appropriate methods of engaging cadets in their learning experiences. Similarly, in-service training may also benefit from finding ways of actively engaging officers in the learning. Literature on andragogy as a teaching method for engaging in student-centered learning is well established (see Conklin, 2012). For educators in China, the blueprint for such change is already in place with the Ministry of Education (2010) in an outline for educational reform.

Conclusions

Policing standards and practices must continuously be updated to meet the challenges of a changing world. While training is needed to provide officers with the necessary skill set to perform their assigned tasks, education is also important. Marenin (2005) asserts that professionalism, accountability and legitimacy are essential attributes of policing within societies that value social justice social cohesion, fairness, equity, and human rights. Roberg and Bonn (2004) assert that education is necessary for the development of these values.

Future studies should seek to broaden the range of police roles and potential indictors of cadets' attitudes toward both policing roles and educational experiences. Studying the impact of teaching styles on learning in order to improve both pre-service and in-service learning is another important area of study. Improved effectiveness of police education and training will assure that officers will be prepared to deliver the best quality of protection and service to their communities both now an in the future.

Table I Factor analysis of three perceptions toward policing role)

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Table II Factor analysis of career motivations and educational perceptions

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Table III Descriptive statistics

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Table IV Unstandardized regression coefficients and/pseudofor the four dependent variables by background and career motivations

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Table V Unstandardized regression coefficients and/pseudofor the four dependent variables by background, career motivation and educational perceptions

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Corresponding author

Dr Steven Jay Cuvelier can be contacted at: [email protected]

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Sun, I.Y., Cretacci, M.A., Wu, Y. and Jin, C. ( 2009 ), " Chinese police cadets' attitudes toward police role and work ",Policing: An International Journal of Police Strategies &management , Vol. 32 No. 4, pp. 758 - 780 .

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Further reading

Dai, M. ( 2008 ), " Policing in the People's Republic of China: a review of recent literature ",Crime, Law and Social Change , Vol. 50 No. 3, pp. 211 - 227 .

Sun, I.Y. ( 2003 ), " Police officers' attitudes toward their role and work: a comparison of black and white officers ",American Journal of Criminal Justice , Vol. 28 No. 1, pp. 89 - 108 .

Sun, I.Y. and Chu, D. ( 2006 ), " Attitudinal differences between Taiwanese and American police officers ",Policing: An International Journal of Police Strategies & Management , Vol. 29 No. 2, pp. 190 - 221 .