STRESS AND COPING STYLES AMONG SPECIAL EDUCATION TEACHERS

Abstract

In order to meet the expectations of the job and students, special education teachers are often stressed due to various factors like workload, public criticism, pressures on student performance, student behavior and worrying about the stability of position. However, they constantly try different coping strategies to overcome stress to manage workload and show better performance. Three styles of coping are commonly used to tackle stressful situations that are problem focused coping, emotion focused coping and avoidant coping. The primary goal of the study was to determine the stress level and what coping strategies are used to decrease stress among special education teachers. To investigate the study's hypothesis, 150 special education teachers who deal with mentally challenged students of 07 to 18 years participated in the study. Through purposive sampling, the data was gathered from 07 special education centers of Rawalpindi and Islamabad. The participants were asked to complete Perceived Stress Scale 10 (Cohen et al., 1983) and Brief – Coping Orientation to Problems Experienced Inventory (Carver, 1997). The results showed that all the study's variables had satisfactory reliability (=.57 to.79) in the study. The result further showed negative significant correlation between stress and coping styles as Avoidant coping positively predicted stress while problem focused coping negatively predicted stress and emotion focused coping also negatively predicted stress. Moreover, t test showed that females tend to have higher level of stress as compared to males and females use more avoidant coping while males use more problem focused and emotion focused coping. The present study serves to pave a pathway for special education professionals and aware educational institutions to work on needs of special educators and help them improve their abilities. These results, in particular, emphasize the need for additional research to solve this issue.