The article summarizes the results of research on the professional stress among Latvian teachers (N = 300). Both the external and internal causes of teachers’ stress (stressors) were analyzed. Investigation of external causes of stress was carried out by means of Questionnaire of Teacher Stress (by C. Kyriacou). This measure contains the fifty sources of teacher’s stress. To define the internal sources of stress The Life Style Scale (by R. M. Kern) was applied. The information will be given about the self-evaluation of teacher stress, causes of teacher stress, evaluation of differences between the teachers with different lifestyles and developmental model of teacher stress.

The opportunities of school psychologist in the prevention and coping with the professional stress at school are derived from the research data and partially reflected in the visual model of teacher’s professional stress.

In many countries work of the teacher currently is considered as one of the most stressful professions (Hunter M., 1977). Last two decades an intensive research in USA and Europe has been developed regarding both the sources and symptoms of teacher professional stress (Dunham I., 1992; Kyriacou C., 1990; McLauglin M.W., 1986; Kelly M.J., 1988; Kokss T., 1989; Cole M. & Walker S., 1989; Gold J. & Roth R. A.,1993; Schwab R.L.,1995, etc.). Investigations in the field of teacher stress indicate that the great part of teacher stress can be explained with a rapid pace of changes in education in 1980^s and 1990^s.

In his article “Teachers in the Twenty-first Century: time to renew the vision” C.Day focuses on the situation within the teaching profession: “For many teachers, the last 20 years have been years of survival, rather than development. As social and economic change have placed new demands upon and created new expectations from schools, hardly a year has passed without some reform being mooted, negotiated or imposed in the name of raising standards (appraisal, inspection), increasing ‘user’ participation (open enrollment, local financial management) and pupil entitlement (a national curriculum).

Yet I would predict that teachers in the twenty-first century will become more, rather than less important to the fabric of society and that their contributions to the socio-economic health of nations will become more valued (54; 101).”

During the workshops, discussions and consultation process Latvian teachers point to the similar situation in their profession. The established situation and problems in contemporary school can be illustrated by the words of teacher with fifteen years of work experience: “Unfortunately, the part of the society does not understand that teacher is not the preprogrammed machine, which can continuously work in an overloaded regime. Teacher simply is a person with his own needs and problems, which lately has been especially hard to cope with. Teacher can not perform his tasks motivated only by his enthusiasm, if the professional problems stay unsolved. Therefore, the young generation, the children will have to suffer. Because, to raise the spiritually and bodily healthy children, the teacher has to be healthy himself.”

To help teachers and, therefore, also the pupils, we started the research of teacher professional stress. We were interested in:

• The sources and peculiarities of Latvian teacher stress;
• The factors of teacher personality influencing a perception of the sources of stress.

Therefore, the aim of our research was to discover the internal and external factors of teacher professional stress such as the professional stressors (internal) and individual lifestyle of teacher (external). The main aspects of our conception are reflected in Figure1.

Fifteen Latvian secondary schools were randomly selected in the middle of school year 2000/2001. The following constraints were observed: schools selected for the experiment were urban secondary schools with 600 – 1200 pupils. 300 teachers of basic and secondary schools were offered 2 methods: Questionnaire of Teacher Stress and Kern Lifestyle Scale.

Questionnaire of Teacher Stress (by C. Kyriacou & I. Sutcliffe). The measure was designed considering the assumption that teachers are able to provide valid reports of the sources of experienced stress, therefore, the questionnaire can be used as a self-report method. The questionnaire consists of some sections.

The first section requests the biographical information regarding sex, qualification, age, length of teaching experience and position held in the school. This section contains the open questions.

The second section consists of 50 items regarding sources of stress. The teachers are asked to rate their response to each of the sources of stress on a five-point scale labeled: No stress (0), Mild stress (1), Moderate stress (2), Much stress (3), Extreme stress (4).

(Stress is seen as a result of the interaction between the professional activities and personality.)

The third section asks teachers to give an answer on the question: “In general, how stressful do you find being a teacher?” Response on this question is measured on a five-point scale. The response to this question was used as a measure of self-reported teacher stress.

Kern Lifestyle Scale (by R. Kern). Kern Lifestyle Scale (KLS) is a 35-item survey instrument, developed by R. M. Kern from the Georgia University (1982). KLS has been continuously improved by means of its component analysis, research of its validity and reliability.

This measure can be used to help the family couples, individuals, students, management staff and educational groups. KLS was developed to obtain the information on the lifestyle necessary for an evaluation of the relationships with spouse or other people, carrier decisions, organizational or conflicting style of leadership as well as to help professionals to understand the individual reactions in the stress situations.

KLS can be applied to determine the hidden way individual interacts with other individuals in personal, social or professional environment. Hidden phenomena can be changed into the overt ones through the evaluation of lifestyle in scores.

The author provides the following description of scales:

The Control Scale attempts to assess the person’s need to direct others, control the showing on emotions, and approach problems in a rational logical fashion.

Perfection Scale identifies the persons’ needs to work hard at organizing their life and avoid mistakes.

The Scale Need to please focuses on how important it is for the individual to go along with others, not causes interpersonal problems, and work hard at being liked by all.

The Scale Self esteem addresses the individuals belief that they can handle most of life’s problems and that they can encourage others and themselves.

The Expectations Scale tries to get at how realistic the individual is in setting goals and expectations on self and others.

To conduct a valid research on teacher stress it should be started with an exploration of teachers’ attitude toward the professional stress. To reach this purpose we used the answers on the question: “In general, how stressful do you find being a teacher?” provided by 300 teachers. The results are reflected in Table 1 and they show the differences of attitudes in various biographical categories of teachers.

Table 1 Subjective evaluation of professional stress

The table reflects the teachers’ subjective evaluation of their stress. More than a half of respondents suggests that a work of teacher is connected with much stress (54%) and extreme stress (5%).

To understand the determination of Latvian teacher stress we have to look upon the evaluation of the sources of teacher stress. To reach this goal, the data received from the analysis of teachers’ ratings on the 50 items has to be explored. These items are connected with more or less serious causes of stress in the profession of teacher. The data are displayed in Table 3. A correlation matrix of the sources of stress consisted only of positive correlations (1225). All 50 sources of teacher stress were positively correlated with subjective evaluation of teacher stress (r ranging from .134 to .364; all p < .05)(see Table 2).

Table 2 Sources of teacher stress: means, correlations with subjective evaluation of teacher stress and loadings on the first (unrotated) factor

*p<0.5

The rating of mean scores shows that the largest indices in relation to the teacher stress sources are tied to such sources as punishing pupils (2.25), responsibility for pupils (e.g., exam success) (2.17), inadequate salary (2.13), pupils’ impolite behavior or cheek.

The distribution of answers within the each source of stress ranging from “no stress” to “extreme stress” was rather different reflecting the individuality of every teacher

For the most part the answers had the normal distribution or positive skew. This skewness ranged from .32 to 1.036, the standard deviations from .9 to 1.14.

For the purposes of grouping all 50 sources of stress were subjected to a principal component analysis. The matrix of the components was designed with all 50 stress sources loading positively (ranging from .287 to .692).

Table 3 Sources of teacher stress: Varimax rotated factors (loadings greater than .40)

The first extracted factor accounted for 24.43 per cent of the total variance, second factor accounted for 5.12 per cent of the total variance, third and fourth factors accounted for 4.36 and 3.96 per cents of the total variance respectively.

Results of factor analysis obtained in the given sample allow discerning the most important groups of stress sources relevant for the contemporary Latvian teacher (Table 3).

The first group of sources was labeled pupil misbehavior, as all sources of stress included in this group deal with the problem teacher encounters monitoring the discipline and working environment in class. Why does this factor account for the highest per cents of the total variance (24.3)? During the discussions, workshops, in their compositions teachers explained that misbehavior is the main cause of teacher professional stress, as this factor hinders the fulfillment of main professional task – to teach, a self-esteem of teacher suffers, his authority among the colleagues and administration decreases. The data show that regardless of differences in teacher education and different contingent of pupils, the group of causes concerning a discipline problem appears as a fundamental source of teacher stress.

We will begin the analysis of teachers’ answers about their lifestyle with a general characteristic and distribution of lifestyles in a given sample (see Table 4).

Table 4 Distribution of teacher sample by lifestyle (n=300)

As the table shows, the largest number of answers has received two scales: need to please and perfectionism. According to the interpretation of R. Kern, the scale of need to please is a component of the perfectionism scale.

The large number of answers in these scales, as well as the essential difference of this number from the number of answers obtained regarding the other scales suggest the following.

Among the individuals choosing the profession of teacher two lifestyles are dominating, i.e. perfectionist and person who wants to be liked by others. Therefore, according to a conception of A. Adler and his view on the lifestyles, these are the individuals who, in order to rise their self-esteem, to increase the feelings of own significance, to experience the community with the society and belonging to this society, unconsciously have made a decision in favor of “I have to be perfect”, “I have to be liked by others”.

Let’s see what happens when the perfectionist and person who want to be liked by others enter the system of education and how these lifestyles influence the development of stress.

Perfectionist is a person characterized by a meticulousness, cautiousness, sensibility, prudence and wish to do everything right. As the perfectionist endures his mistakes very acutely, one can predict that while working as a teacher he is bond to encounter the negative emotions as the teacher’s work is hardly pictured without the mistakes not at the beginning nor at the end of carrier. The teacher’s work always means the cooperation with the pupils and, as the success is depending on mutual efforts, it is obvious, that a teacher-perfectionist facing the professional failure because of the poor motivation of pupils will experience guilt for an incompleteness of results obtained. As the perfectionist is fond of an order, structure, precision and planning ahead, one can easy imagine the difficulties created for him by this profession, especially, concerning the current situation of teacher in Latvia. Frequent changes and changing of national standards rise the doubts and uncertainty of perfectionist about the right and wrong activities. Therefore, despite the fact that perfectionists are great employees, this profession can cause them large stress, as the perfectionism in this profession is just an ideal to reach for. Besides, this way toward the ideal is possible only through the learning from the own mistakes, which is so hard for perfectionist.

Regarding the second dominating lifestyle with an aim to receive the recognition of other people, one can see how difficult is to reach this aim in such a field of human activity as the work of teacher. Strive to offend nobody, consideration of the interests of all parties are reached at an expense of individual needs of persons with mentioned lifestyle. This can lead to the lack of the control over one’s life and to the loss of self-respect.

Wishing to receive the recognition of others, teacher with this lifestyle will try hard to avoid any conflicts in an external world. The cost will be the frequent inner conflicts (health problems). During their professional activities the teachers themselves can discover the strategies of coping with professional stress and the analysis of these strategies shows that these teachers who have developed their positive self-evaluation skills, the skills of self-acceptance without the search of recognition of others have found the way out of continuous experience of stress in their work. A teacher with the 25 years work experience recognizes that one of ways to cope with a stress is to be liked by yourself.

Therefore, we can state that despite of several advantages of two above mentioned styles such as remarkable social interests, meticulousness, good listening skills and other traits rather valuable in the teaching profession, there are some “weak points” facilitating the development of stress for the employees with the dominance of these two lifestyles.

Table 5 shows the combinations of these two lifestyles – perfectionism and need to please, dominating in the research sample.

Table 5 Most frequent combinations of teachers’ lifestyles (n=300)

 We have discovered the correlation between these two lifestyles (r = .245, p= .05). According to the description provided by R. Kern these individuals are the best in the situations creating the minimal inner conflict and ensuring the high level of personal recognition. As the conflicts are natural component of educational process, but an issue about the appropriate recognition of teachers’ work is still unresolved, we can state that the individual lifestyle can develop the sensitivity of teacher toward the certain stressors in the professional field.

As the perfectionist’s conception of lifestyle can not be implemented in the process of teaching, his self-esteem suffers, the teacher feels as a looser and it is difficult for him to admit that he is not completely perfect. In this case he chooses to keep his fear suppressed, to spend his energy for a defense, however, the cost of this strategy can be very high.

Therefore, it can be noticed that the analysis of teacher lifestyle hides many ways of prevention of teacher professional stress, as the person is prone to develop the abilities for the management of phenomena he is aware of.

Let’s analyze the influence of teacher lifestyle on his peculiar perception of certain sources of stress in the teaching profession.

Regardless of a lack of serious correlations between the explored variables obtained through the data analysis, the figures still allow to reveal some tendencies of correlation between the sources of stress and lifestyle.

The sources of stress indicating the statistically significant correlation within the critical limits of Pearson correlation coefficient are displayed in Table 6.

Table 6 Intercorrelations of teachers’ lifestyle and sources of professional stress scores (Pearson r*)

* Critical limits of Pearson correlation coefficient (ν = 300) are the .113 for two-tailed test (p< .05).

As the table shows, the largest number of significant correlations can be observed inspecting the most frequent style – need to please (23 correlations all together). Therefore, the first difference of this style is that in comparison with other lifestyles the larger number of sources of stress is a peculiarity of teachers craving for the recognition from others. Wishing to please pupils, administration and other teachers (parents were not included in the stress sources), teacher with such a style is sensible to all the sources diminishing his professional self-respect: these are the difficulties with a discipline and poor discipline of pupils. Besides, exactly this lifestyle has a certain correlation with such source of stress as an attitude of other teachers. The table shows that for the teachers, whose self-esteem completely depends on the evaluation of others, experience when the pupils do not accept the authority of the teacher is more painful comparing with other teachers (.232). Results of teachers with a lifestyle aimed to please the others, comparing with the other groups of lifestyle, indicate a closer correlation with the subjective evaluation of stress (r = .203). Though the data obtained do not show the high correlations, consultation experience with the teachers allows to assume that teacher group, wishing to receive the recognition of others, can be included in the group of employees most sensitive to the professional stress. This assumption can be approved also by the T-test results suggesting that the teacher with the dominance of these scales differ from the representatives of other lifestyles with the higher subjective evaluation of stress.

Analysis of the sources of stress causing dissatisfaction among the perfectionists, shows the zones of discomfort typical for the representatives of given lifestyle. Inadequate disciplinary sanctions available destroy the perfectionists’ feelings of clearness concerning the school situation. We can see that exactly this lifestyle with a credo “to be ideal” correlates with such sources of stress as “lack of effective consultation” and “poor promotion opportunities”.

In turn such lifestyle group as a martyr has the results correlating with a low status of teaching profession and inadequate salary. These correlations obviously reflect the unfulfilled expectations of teachers with a given lifestyle.

As the results show, teachers with a domination of control scale did not indicate the significant correlations with the sources of stress, only one source of stress “ too much work to do” was more emphasized. This source really can lead to the larger stress for the teachers with a mentioned lifestyle, as it inhibits the convincing control of school situation.

In relation to the lifestyle victim the correlations with such sources as “groups of too wide an ability” and “mixed ability groups” should be noticed as these sources create the difficulties in one’s work and can point to the lack of ability to deal with the situation. Teachers with the given lifestyle can loose their self-confidence and they can also experience the negative emotions.

In course of analysis the correlations common for almost all lifestyles were not discussed. These correlations indicate that there are the sources of stress significant for all teachers regardless not only of length of work experience, country, but also of their individual peculiarities. The source of stress corresponding to these conditions is “pupils misbehavior”.

One can discover also that representatives of almost all lifestyles need the recognition for extra work and they suffer from a pressure of time.

• Therefore, the research has approved that the causes of teacher professional stress have a multidimensional character: professional stress is the combination of internal and external causes.
• Teacher lifestyle influences the perception and reaction toward the certain sources of stress and this influence displays itself in a definite profile of stress sources.
• Objective sources of professional stress (stressors) can be considered only as the potential sources of stress. These sources can lead to the real stress if the teacher perceives them as the threats to satisfaction of fundamental needs presented through his lifestyle – to be ideal, to fulfill all the requirements, to avoid mistakes, to receive the recognition of others. Therefore, the subjective evaluation of stressors is a result of the frustration of these needs. Lack of possibilities to fulfill the needs of lifestyle within the teaching profession endangers the Self-concept of teacher and, as a result, leads to the negative emotions. Feeling of professional failure influences the self-esteem of teacher and his sense of self in general.
• Research also reveals the possible activity directions of school psychologist toward an improvement of teacher professional well-being. One of these directions includes the different activities targeted to help teachers change the perception of their work situation and their personal competence, as well as to find the ways of constructive interaction with the stressors in professional field. The next field of activity is the work with school administration, helping to choose the healthy management strategies to avoid the unnecessary sources of stress at school. School psychologists can help the school administration to become aware that an atmosphere of positive support at school can improve the work of entire school.

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