The police profession is a highly stressful occupation but we the question of the existence of specific police stressors and reactions toward those stressors remains. The aim of this study was to examine two different police stressors: organisational and occupational stressors, stress not related to work and test anxiety, because all participants are also students. The aim also was the examination of participants’ coping mechanisms with work stress and stress related to test situations. The participants were 235 police officers. The following questionnaires were used: Ways of coping questionnaire (WOC, Lazarus & Folkman, 2011), PHCC test anxiety questionnaire (PHCC, Nist & Diehl, 1990) and stress was measured with a scale developed for this research. The results showed that police officers suffer significantly more from work related rather than stress not related to work. They also showed that police officers are under significantly greater organizational rather than operative stress. Our subjects are also students so we examined the level of test anxiety and the results showed that the majority of subjects experienced a medium level of test anxiety. The subjects used confrontation and self-control as ways of coping with police stress and acceptance of responsibility and problem solving when coping with test anxiety.

police stress, examination stress, coping