Stress and spirituality among school teachers

Pages: 305-308
Sudarsan Behera (Department of Applied Psychology Pondicherry University, Pondicherry)
Manaswini Dash (Department of Psychology Utkal University, Bhubaneswar)

Nowadays teaching profession is perceived by the teachers as a very stressful occupation as they have to do a variety of works. The present study has been designed to study stress and spirituality among school teachers in relation to several demographic variables such as gender, age, locality of work and residence, length of work experience, and type of school in which they are working. For this purpose a purposive sample of 240 school teachers with equal number of teachers from three different types of schools, i.e., elementary schools, middle schools, and high schools of Odisha were administered the Indore Teacher Job Stressor Scale (Rathod&Varma, 2005) and the Spirituality transcendence Scale (Reker & Prabhu, 1989). One-way Analyses of Variances revealed significant differences in total amount of stress experienced as well as spirituality as a function of locality and type of school. It is suggested that in the face of stress teachers are using spirituality as a coping mechanism which in turn, reduces their stress- level. The results are discussed in socio-educational context of Odisha.