Firstly, "Parsing a pojo" is really a wrong terminology. You are just accessing a POJO and not parsing it.
Megha: If this was a List<String> I could have used the
contains() or indexOf() method to do this. I am stumped as it is a list of pojos.
I would ask a question. Why do you think, you can only use the contains() and indexOf() methods for List<String> and not for List<RoleType>?
Both of these methods use equals() method to determine whether the object requested matches with any of those present in the list.
As Campbell has pointed out, if you have equals() method implemented in RoleType that checks for the String RoleType for equality, then you might as well use contains() for RoleType too. But the lob side will be that you have to have a RoleType instance to pass to contains(). If you do not already have one, then it is not really suggested to use contains() as you have to create a new instance for every search.
In such a case, you can follow Jeff's suggestion(Use HashMap) for a faster search.