Personal resource strength and teacher strain

Research in Education, Nov 1998 by Pithers, Bob, Soden, Rebecca

he personal coping resources that teachers use to mitigate the work stress to which they are exposed has not received a great deal of attention in the teacher stress research literature. This is despite the voluminous and widespread research reported on teacher stress and strain in recent years. The fact that teacher distress can be alleviated by the individual's perception of the threat and by the personal resources which are elicited by the stressor has been known for some time (e.g. Kyriacou and Sutcliffe, 1978; Quick and Quick, 1984). Many studies, over the ensuing years, have concentrated on the range and intensity of the stressors in teaching, on the degree of distress and burn-out experienced by teachers and on the psychological and physiological symptoms that result from work-related stress.

Nevertheless, personal factors have been implicated in the level of stress and strain reported by teachers. Gender, cognitive style and a range of personality variables have all been found to be associated with significant variations in the levels of occupational stress reported by teachers (e.g. Borg and Riding,1993; Pierce and Molloy, 1990). Fontana and Abouserie (1993) have argued that certain personality dimensions, such as extroversion and neuroticism, appear to contribute more to stress levels than do other variables such as age or gender. They found one in four of the teachers studied suffering a 'high' level of stress and noted a need for future research to examine further the connections between an individual's personality and stress, as well as how vulnerable individuals might be afforded some stress protection.

More recent research in this area has tended to focus on certain aspects of an individual's personality which may be related to teacher stress and strain. The hope is that, if such relationships can be established, these aspects of the individual might be strengthened so that the strain produced by perceived work stressors is reduced; distress becomes eustress. The problem appears to be a serious one and is worthy of urgent research attention, given findings like those of Manthei and Gilmore (1996), who, after a four-year-long study of teacher stress in New Zealand, found a general increase in stress levels over the period and a decrease in job satisfaction. This was in contrast to other studies, where indirect indicators of stress were examined.

What are some of the personal resources that the individual may employ to help cope with stress? Bowers (1995) found, in his study of assertiveness and stress, that teachers who adopted an assertive/persuasive coping style, when dealing with a range of work-based stressors, experienced significantly less psychological stress. He suggested that teachers develop and strengthen job strategies based on these two coping resources. Cockburn (1996) surveyed 335 primary teachers and asked them about their perceived stress level, as well as to rate their preferred coping strategies. She found that the respondents were aware of thirty-five stress reduction strategies. They reported the most effective as being: effective lesson preparation and subject matter knowledge, a sense of humour, closely followed by the discussion of concerns with peers; 63 per cent of the sample had tried out `discussion of concerns' and reported the technique as effective. Cockburn preferred to focus more on the moderating strategies of effective teacher preparation and subject matter knowledge and not other personal mediators as stress reduction strategies; others have not done so.

Punch and Tuetteman (1996) have shown that there are aspects of teachers' work environment which can reduce the build-up of stress. The 'destressors' studied by these workers were collegial support and praise/recognition; both factors, they argue, can be promoted in teachers' work environments. Their research outcomes, based on a study of 574 secondary school teachers, indicated that collegial support was the major factor which tended to ameliorate the distress associated with four work stressors: student misbehaviour, inadequate access to facilities, intrusion of work demands into private time and excessive societal expectations.

Other research evidence has also implicated work-based social support as an area worthy of further study (Pithers and Fogarty, 1995; Pithers and Soden, 1998). The purpose of these studies, however, was to examine occupational stress and strain among teachers compared with a group of nonteacher professionals and to examine comparative stress and strain among two groups of teachers in different countries. In these studies a standardised psychological instrument was used to measure teachers' stress and strain, unlike in many other studies, which have used non-standardised teachermade self-report inventories, questionnaires, diaries or other survey instruments which may lack validity or reliability and normative data. Pithers (1995) has pointed out the potential problems with generalisations made about teacher stress and strain or about, the strength of an individual's coping resources, based on non-standardised measures.