Anxiety and coping of nursing staff: Is prison a factor of protection? ; Anxiété et coping des soignants : la prison est-elle un facteur de protection ?

International audience ; Stress and anxiety are recurrent problems in human development. Certain situations exacerbate them, while conversely, certain mechanisms, such as coping, moderate them. We are investigating this question through research into the anxiety and coping of prison health staff. We hypothesize that the participants will report significant state anxiety due to the unpredictable nature of the prison context. We also expect them to report emotion-oriented copings as a consequence of this state-anxiety. As a first step, we collected the sources of stress and copings of 13 prison caregivers during an interview. We then created an "ad hoc" coping scale. In a second phase, we proposed the STAI-Y anxiety-state questionnaire and our coping scale to 50 prison carers. Contrary to our hypotheses, we observed low levels of state anxiety. They do not differ according to demographic variables (gender, age, seniority, profession) or prison variables (time spent working with inmates or type of prison). The copings are problem-focused, contrary to our hypothesis. We note no difference in the frequency of their use according to demographic variables. On the other hand, working in prisons or with inmates on a daily basis increased the frequency of use of problem-focused copings. We discuss these surprising results in the light of transactional-cognitive theory, the perception of prison (unpredictability vs. controllability) and the cognitive representation of incarcerated people (patients vs. inmates). ; Stress et anxiété sont des problèmes récurrents dans le développement humain. Certaines situations les exacerbent alors qu'inversement, certains mécanismes tel le coping les modèrent. Nous étudions cette question par le biais d'une recherche sur l'anxiété et les copings des soignants en milieu carcéral. Nous posons comme hypothèses que ces sujets rapporteront une anxiété-état importante en raison de la nature imprévisible du contexte carcéral. Nous pensons également qu'ils rapporteront des copings orientés vers ...