The Creation of a Correctional Officer Trainee Self-Efficacy Index: An Application of Item Response Theory

Abstract Correctional staff turnover has been linked to burnout in current staff, risk of physical injury due to understaffing, and high replacement costs due to onboarding processes. To date, much research has been devoted to job characteristics and demographic profiles to understand turnover, but little research has examined highly dynamic factors, such as self-efficacy. Given that self-efficacy has been linked to absenteeism, turnover, and engagement across vocational contexts, the current study seeks to provide practitioners and researchers with the tools to examine self-efficacy through the Correctional Officer Trainee Self-Efficacy Index. Comprising each task that correctional officer training academies train in, the self-efficacy index can be used to identify areas improvement in curricula or in individual officer development throughout training. Using the graded response model of item response theory, we examine item-level properties of the index using a sample of 673 pre-service correctional officers across two Midwestern and one Southern state. Results indicated that the self-efficacy indices loaded onto two factors. Each item had high discrimination, and the range of difficulty parameters for the items was wide. Overall, the correctional officer trainee task self-efficacy index is effective for those with low to high self-efficacy for correctional officer tasks.