Daiva Bubelienė, Gediminas Merkys
Abstract
The article is intended to reveal the relationship between teachers’ occupational stress and health status of working teachers. Theoretical concept of the study is based on the hypothesis that the occupation of the teacher has the increased stress, high mental workload and it will eventually negatively affect health condition of working teachers. The study presents the quantitative survey data of Lithuanian teachers (N = 961). In order to measure the occupational stress there are used 25 primary variables that reflect the different work stressors. The primary variables are used to create 8 subscales and a joint scale that are specified with appropriate psychometric quality. In order to evaluate health status of the teachers, there was applied the consisting of 19 clinical symptoms subjective well-being scale with the appropriate psychometric quality. Approximately every third teacher (32. 65 %) suffers from increased occupational stress and approximately every fourth teacher (29.03 %) systematically gets specific clinical symptoms. There is a very reliable positive correlation (r = 0.50; p = 0.000) between joint “occupational stress” and “clinical symptoms” scales. Discriminant analysis was used to define the clinical symptoms that enable to separate (to discriminate) teachers’ groups who possess relatively high and low level of stress. It turned out that two contrasting groups differ in all 19 clinical symptoms. The most evident are the symptoms reflecting the status of mental health and mental exhaustion.
Keyword(s): occupational stress; teachers; health; clinical symptoms.
DOI: 10.5200/sm-hs.2016.092
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