Examining teacher stress-vulnerability in the US secondary school context

ABSTRACT

Understanding how teachers appraise their environments for potential demands and resources can inform education stakeholders interested in mitigating vocational stress. Using data from the United States National Center for Education Statistics Schools and Staffing Survey, the current study examined how secondary teachers’ appraisals of their workplace environments correlated with their risk for stress, workplace fatigue, and occupational commitment to remain in teaching. Findings indicated that teachers who perceive greater classroom control were less vulnerable to occupational stress and other vocational concerns. Teachers working out of their subject area field were associated with higher susceptibility to workplace fatigue. Unique to the secondary education environment, results also found that schools with high concentrations of stress-vulnerable teachers were associated with higher levels of average workplace fatigue and lower levels of occupational commitment. The results of this study suggest that “upstream” interventions, aimed at addressing systemic issues within schools, might ameliorate the risk for stress among secondary school teachers.

KEYWORDS:

• Teacher stress
• working conditions
• out-of-field teaching
• secondary education
• stress
• appraisal

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. All sample sizes were rounded to the nearest 10 per NCES data disclosure procedures.

2. The survey can be found here: https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/sass/pdf/0708/sass4a.pdf.

3. The multilevel statistical level-I models used in the analyses with quantitative outcomes (Appraisal Index and workplace fatigue) are displayed in the Appendix.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Spencer Foundation [201500094].