Stress and coping strategies among teachers at St. Andrea Kaahwa’s College, Hoima City

Abstract

Teaching as a profession is progressively becoming a stressful occupation. Stress is one of the worst health problems which teachers have to deal with. Also coping may be an important resource to teachers in dealing with multiple demands of their profession. The study aimed to assess the occupational stress and coping strategies among secondary school teachers. A descriptive design was utilized. The study was conducted at one school in Hoima city, Uganda. Simple random sampling technique was used to select the participants. 36 teachers participated in the study. Two tools were used to collect data which includes the Perceived stress scale and the Brief cope inventory. The result reveals that 50% teachers had moderate stress while 5.56% had little stress, 13.89% had mild stress and 30.6% had high level of stress. The mean score of problem focused coping was 9.444, emotion focused coping was 7.917 and avoidant coping was 4.139. There wasn’t a statistically significant association between the teacher’s gender and perceived stress (p=0.711). There wasn’t a statistically significant association between teaching experience and perceived stress (p=0.213). There wasn’t a statistically significant relationship between perceived stress and coping strategies (p=0.411). The study concluded that majority of teachers had moderate and high level of work stress and used problem focused coping more than emotion focused and avoidant coping