Violence at School and the Well-Being of Teachers. The Importance of Positive Relationships

How to Measure the Mental Health of Teachers? Psychometric Properties of the GHQ-12 in a Large Sample of German Teachers

To improve the health status of teachers, there is a need for good and reliable instruments to continuously assess their mental health. The current study proposed the GHQ-12 questionnaire as an appropriate instrument for measuring the mental health of teachers. The GHQ-12 is a well-established screening instrument that has mostly been applied in non-teaching samples. In the current study, the psychometric properties of the questionnaire were analyzed using a large sample of German teachers (N = 3996). The data was collected yearly over an extended period of time (2012-2020). Results showed good to very good reliability, as well as high correspondence to burnout and life satisfaction scales. Principal axis factor analysis supported a two-factor structure: Factor 1 represents "depression/stress" and Factor 2 represents "loss of confidence". However, the mental health of the investigated teachers was worse than that of a representative sample in Germany. Consequently, this study highlighted the fact that the teaching profession is vulnerable to mental strain and underlined the importance of promoting prevention programs that could help to sustain and foster the mental health of teachers. In this context, the GHQ-12 could be proposed as a good and economic tool to assess and analyze mental health in German teachers. The presented norm could help practitioners and teachers to compare individual scores within a larger peer group.

Digital labor of school teachers and their well-being: content analysis of English-language dailies in India

The concept of online and hybrid classrooms has penetrated mainstream school education in India during the recent COVID-19 pandemic. It has popularized digital technologies mediated teaching in schools and ensuing digital labor has affected the everyday routine activities of teachers. The sudden shift to the unfamiliar domain of digital labor has an impact on the well-being of teachers. This paper studies well-being through the theory of stress and coping with coping viewed through the lens of social systems theory. For this purpose, articles related to online teaching in the top three Indian English language dailies, namely the Hindustan Times, The Hindu and The Indian Express were analyzed using the Factiva database and content analysis research tool. Eighty-six articles were analyzed from March 2020 to July 2021 when online teaching commenced and continued into hybrid teaching in India. Novel sources of stress factors and their coping using resources among school teachers were identified using selective coding in NVivo software. It was found that only limited resources were provided at different levels of social systems to address the identified sources of stress factors. Finally, sentiment analysis of school teachers revealed negative sentiment indicating low levels of job satisfaction. Hence, it was concluded that digital labor had a deteriorating effect on the well-being of Indian school teachers.

Student aggression against teachers, stress, and emotional intelligence as predictors of withdrawal intentions among secondary school teachers

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES

This exploratory study aimed to test the buffering effect of emotional intelligence in the associations between aggression against teachers, perceived stress, and withdrawal intentions.

DESIGN AND METHODS

A sample of 329 secondary school teachers (51.4% female) completed questionnaires assessing aggression against teachers, perceived stress, withdrawal intentions, and emotional intelligence.

RESULTS

The results showed that emotional intelligence was negatively related to perceived stress and withdrawal intentions. Across moderated-mediation analysis, there were mixed findings regarding the moderating effects of emotional intelligence in the proposed model. Findings indicated that emotional intelligence moderated only the association between perceived stress and withdrawal intentions.

CONCLUSIONS

These findings suggest that emotional intelligence is a psychological resource for mitigating the negative effects of perceived stress on negative work attitudes among teaching professionals in the context of harmful student behaviors. Possible avenues for including emotional intelligence in the field of teacher victimization are discussed.

Associations between Teacher- and Student-directed Sexual and Physical Violence in Physical Education

This study examined relationships between teachers' perceptions of verbal and non-verbal sexual harassment and physical violence against teachers and among students in physical education (PE). Participants were 175 (females 122, males 53) Finnish PE teachers between 27 and 62 years (M = 44.8 ± 9.2 years). The cross-sectional data were collected by an anonymous online survey in the fall semester 2018. The findings showed that (a) higher levels of verbal sexual harassment and physical violence among students were associated with higher levels of equivalent types of violence against PE teachers, (b) higher levels of verbal and non-verbal sexual harassment among students were associated with higher levels of physical assaults among students, whereas only non-verbal sexual harassment was associated with physical violence against teachers, and (c) verbal sexual harassment and physical violence among students occurred more frequently in PE classes instructed by less experienced teachers. The results indicated that to prevent both teacher- and student-directed verbal sexual harassment and physical violence in school PE, special attention could be given to the positive development of student-student relationships.

Teachers' Personal and Collective Work-Identity Predicts Exhaustion and Work Motivation: Mediating Roles of Psychological Job Demands and Resources

The aim of this study was to investigate the mediating roles of teachers' psychological job demands and resources regarding personal and collective work-identity, respectively, and exhaustion and self-determined work motivation, respectively. A total of 2,905 members of a Swedish teacher's trade union received an online questionnaire by e-mail; 768 individuals answered the questionnaire and so participated in this study. The data were obtained by self-reported measures (e.g., emotional and cognitive components of work-identity, psychological job demands and resources, exhaustion and work motivation) and analyzed by mediation regression analyses. The results showed that teachers' psychological job demands (prosocial extra-role performance) mediated relationships between cognitive personal work-identity and emotional collective work-identity, respectively, and exhaustion. Teachers' psychological job resources (educational inspiration) mediated relationships between emotional personal work-identity and cognitive collective work-identity, respectively, and self-determined work motivation. Thus, teachers might be disadvantaged by stronger personal work-related thinking and collective work-related feeling when related to exhaustion, to some extent accounted for by psychological job demands, and they might find advantage in stronger personal work-related feeling and collective work-related thinking when related to work motivation, to some extent accounted for by psychological job resources.

Contributions From Psychology to Effectively Use, and Achieving Sexual Consent

Psychology related to areas such as gender, language, education and violence has provided scientific knowledge that contributes to reducing coercive social relationships, and to expanding freedom in sexual-affective relationships. Nonetheless, today there are new challenges that require additional developments. In the area of consent, professionals from different fields, such as law, gender, and education, are in need of evidence differentiating human communication that produces consent, and those conditions that coerce. Up to now, consent has been focused on verbal language, for example, “no means no,” or “anything less than yes is no.” Despite the fact that focusing consent on verbal language is a very important part of the problem, it does not solve most of the issues currently raised, like the famous case of “La Manada” in Spain. This article presents the most recent results of a new line of research, which places the problem and the solution in communicative acts, not only in speech acts. Even though there might be a “yes” in a sexual-affective relationship, there might not be consent, and it is indeed a coercive relationship if that “yes” has been given in a relationship determined by institutional power or by interactive power. Institutional power may occur if whoever made the proposal for the relationship is a person in charge of the process of selecting personnel in a company, and one of the candidates is the person who receives the proposal. Interactive power may occur if whoever makes the proposal is situated in an equal or inferior position in the company to the person receiving it, but the former threatens sextortion the latter. The potential social impact of this research has been already shown in the cases analyzed for this study.

Psychosocial Risks and Violence Against Teachers. Is It Possible to Promote Well-Being at Work?

Teaching has been reported to be one of the most stressful occupations, with heavy psychological demands, including the need to develop positive relationships with students and their parents; relationships that, in turn, play a significant role in teachers’ well-being. It follows that the impact of any violence perpetrated by a student or parent against a teacher is particularly significant and represents a major occupational health concern. The present study examines for the first time the influence of the Job Demands-Control-Support Model on violence directed against teachers. Six hundred and eighty-six teachers working in elementary and high schools in north-east Italy completed an online, self-report questionnaire. Our findings reveal the role played by working conditions in determining teachers’ experience of violence: greater job demands are associated with most offense types, whereas the availability of diffused social support at school is associated with lower rates of harassment. Workload should be equally distributed and kept under control, and violence should gain its place in the shared daily monitoring of practices and experiences at school in order to provide a socially supportive work environment for all teachers.