Development and Validation of Teachers’ Occupational Stress Scale

Abstract

Occupational stress has become increasingly common in teaching profession. Elementary school teachers possess the most crucial position in the entire system of education. It is deemed important to identify stressors of teachers to help them asses and manage their occupational stress in the workplace. However, no occupational stress scale has been developed for use among public elementary teachers in the Philippines. The study aimed to develop and validate a contextualized Occupational Stress Scale for public elementary teachers. This study was guided with the classical test theory approach. It utilized exploratory sequential mixed methods research design. Literature reviews and in-depth interviews were used to gather qualitative data that was used in the generation of items. Survey data was collected from elementary public teachers in Region VIII (total N=1417) using proportionate simple random sampling. Exploratory factor analysis was used to discover the underlying latent structure of the test. A 60-item scale with three-factor model was developed and labelled as Poor working environment, Work overload, and Student Misbehavior. The findings provided strong evidence that factors related to poor working environment, work overload and students’ misbehavior are the common stressors of public elementary teachers. The Occupational Stress Scale showed excellent overall internal consistency (α= .970) with strong coefficient alphas for Poor working environment (α= .962), Work overload (α= .953), and Student Misbehavior (α=.936) factors. Hence, this scale has the potential to be a consequential tool measuring and assessing teachers’ level of stress.