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Create your survey

Create your survey

How to create police officer survey about mental health and wellness

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Adam Sabla

·

Aug 22, 2025

Create your survey

This article will guide you through how to create a Police Officer survey about Mental Health and Wellness. You can build this survey in seconds using Specific, making real insight collection effortless.

Steps to create a survey for Police Officers about Mental Health and Wellness

If you want to save time, just generate a survey with Specific now. Creating insightful surveys is far simpler than ever thanks to AI-powered survey generators like Specific’s AI survey builder.

  1. Tell what survey you want.

  2. Done.

That’s it—honestly, you don’t even need to read further if you just want a high-quality survey fast. AI will create a professional-grade survey with expert knowledge for you, and it will even ask intelligent follow-up questions to gather richer insights from police officers about mental health and wellness. Semantic surveys powered by AI take care of the details for you.

Why run a Police Officer mental health and wellness survey?

Let’s be clear: gathering feedback from police officers about mental health and wellness isn’t just a box-checking exercise—it’s essential to understanding and improving the well-being of those who serve our communities. Ignoring this means missing out on early warning signs, actionable insights, and opportunities to actually help officers thrive in a high-pressure profession.

  • About 26% of police officers experience symptoms of PTSD in their careers. That is a staggering number and speaks to the need for deliberate action. If you’re not running these surveys, you’re missing out on understanding hidden traumas that might otherwise go unaddressed. [1]

  • Nearly 50% report experiencing depression, yet only 22% of those seek help. This underlines the crucial need to listen directly to officers and prioritize mental health support. [1]

  • Worryingly, 1 in 4 officers have had suicidal thoughts during their careers. That’s not just a statistic—it’s a call to action. [2]

The importance of a police officer recognition survey goes beyond compliance or checking morale. It’s about opening up honest conversations, destigmatizing mental health, and making support accessible—before small issues become critical problems. The benefits of police officer feedback on this topic ripple through individual well-being, team cohesion, and the public’s trust in law enforcement.

If your organization isn’t collecting this feedback, the reality is you’re likely underestimating both the scale of the challenge and the opportunities to improve mental health and wellness outcomes among officers.

What makes an effective mental health and wellness survey?

No two surveys are alike, but a few things separate the truly insightful surveys from the ones that get ignored or deliver low-value data. Effective police officer surveys about mental health and wellness use clear, unbiased questions. They keep a conversational tone, encouraging open and honest feedback. By fostering a low-pressure, judgment-free environment, we get responses that reflect the true state of officer well-being—not just what respondents think we want to hear.

The ultimate test for a good survey is both the quantity (response rate) and quality (depth and clarity) of responses. Higher engagement means higher data quality, which in turn gives us much richer insights to act on.

Bad practices

Good practices

Leading or judgmental questions

Neutral, open-ended prompts

Technical jargon

Simple, conversational language

Too few or too many questions

Right-sized survey focused on core objectives

No follow-up on ambiguous answers

Follow-up questions for clarity

Question types and examples for police officer mental health and wellness surveys

Mixing different question types keeps your Police Officer survey about Mental Health and Wellness engaging and lets you collect both structured insights and personal stories. Here’s how to apply the best formats:

Open-ended questions are perfect for capturing experiences and perspectives in officers’ own words. Use them to encourage honest, nuanced responses—and especially when you want insight into “why” or “how.”

  • Can you describe a specific challenge you’ve faced regarding mental health at work?

  • What changes would you suggest to improve wellness support in your department?

Single-select multiple-choice questions are excellent for quickly understanding the prevalence of key challenges or opinions. Use them when you want crisp, quantifiable data to compare across the team.

How frequently do you feel your workload negatively impacts your mental health?

  • Rarely

  • Sometimes

  • Often

  • Almost always

NPS (Net Promoter Score) question types help you gauge overall sentiment. They’re ideal when you want a single metric of how likely officers are to recommend department support services. For dedicated NPS surveys, try this link to generate a specialized NPS survey for police officers.

On a scale from 0–10, how likely are you to recommend your department’s mental health resources to other officers?

Followup questions to uncover "the why": It’s not enough to capture a one-word answer. The best insights often come from digging one or two layers deeper. Having the AI automatically ask follow-ups like “Can you tell me more about that?” or “Why do you feel this way?” gives context you simply can’t get from a checkbox.

  • Why do you feel your workload affects your mental health?

  • What, specifically, would you improve in available resources?

If you want more ideas, see the best question examples for police officer mental health and wellness surveys, along with actionable advice on crafting them for your team.

What is a conversational survey?

A conversational survey is a modern, chat-based experience where each question feels like part of a natural conversation, not an interrogation. Unlike traditional, static forms, AI-generated conversational surveys actively adapt based on the respondent’s answers—making interviews feel genuinely two-way and dynamic.

Let’s break down the difference:

Manual Survey

AI-Generated Conversational Survey

Static, one-size-fits-all format

Dynamically adjusts questions and follow-ups to context

Time-consuming to build and edit

Built in seconds with expert-level logic

Limited insights—shallow responses

Richer, deeper, more nuanced insights with every reply

Boring for respondents, lower engagement

Feels like a real conversation, boosting honesty and engagement

Why use AI for police officer surveys? AI survey generation lets us stop worrying about question wording or follow-up logic—the system does it for us, instantly, and with expertise. An AI survey example for police officers offers a much better experience by adapting to respondents and encouraging them to open up. With Specific, you always get a best-in-class conversational survey that’s smooth and engaging for both survey creators and responding officers.

If you want a step-by-step walkthrough, we’ve put together a detailed guide on how to create a police officer survey using Specific.

The power of follow-up questions

Adding automated, real-time follow-up questions isn’t just a nice-to-have. It’s what makes these surveys truly conversational and results in deeper, clearer, and more actionable data. Specific’s AI follows up instantly and intelligently, clarifying ambiguous responses and asking thoughtful, context-aware questions—just like a skilled interviewer. This saves hours of back-and-forth emails, delivers better insights, and ensures you aren’t left guessing what respondents really mean. Learn more about this feature in the automatic AI follow-up questions explainer.

  • Police Officer: Sometimes the workload affects my mood.

  • AI follow-up: Can you share a recent example where this happened? How did it impact your day?

How many followups to ask? Aim for 2–3 follow-up questions per topic. More than that can cause fatigue, while fewer can leave things unclear. With Specific, you can set limits or allow skipping when an answer’s already clear enough.

This makes it a conversational survey, rather than a static questionnaire—turning responses into a dialogue, not a data dump.

AI survey analysis, response analysis, text analytics: Even with lots of open-ended feedback, you can analyze everything easily using conversational AI analytics—so analysis stays a breeze, no matter how much qualitative data you collect.

These automated followup questions are a breakthrough—try generating a survey to experience how much more you can learn compared to a traditional form.

See this mental health and wellness survey example now

Ready to get deeper insights and honest feedback from police officers? Use a conversational AI-powered survey to start uncovering what’s really happening—and make meaningful improvements to well-being. Create your own survey and see the difference for yourself.

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Sources

  1. zipdo.co. Police Mental Health Statistics

  2. wifitalents.com. Police Mental Health: Recent Statistics and Facts

  3. BMC Psychiatry. Underreporting of Mental Health Symptoms in Police Employer Screenings

Adam Sabla - Image Avatar

Adam Sabla

Adam Sabla is an entrepreneur with experience building startups that serve over 1M customers, including Disney, Netflix, and BBC, with a strong passion for automation.

Adam Sabla

Adam Sabla is an entrepreneur with experience building startups that serve over 1M customers, including Disney, Netflix, and BBC, with a strong passion for automation.

Adam Sabla

Adam Sabla is an entrepreneur with experience building startups that serve over 1M customers, including Disney, Netflix, and BBC, with a strong passion for automation.