Potential school violence: Relationship between teacher anxiety and warning-sign identification

Abstract

This study examined the relationship between teacher anxiety and their identification of warning signs of student violence. Fifty-six public school teachers, 22 male and 34 female, between the ages of 23 and 60 participated. Participants identified warning signs in five fictional student case files created for this study and completed the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory and a demographic survey. The case files included positive and negative information, and high- and low-severity warning signs. Neither state (r = .02) nor trait (r = .04) anxiety was significantly correlated with high-severity warning-signs identification. Low-severity warning-signs identification was positively correlated with state anxiety (r = .28, p .05). False positive identification was not significantly related to state anxiety (r =.07) or trait anxiety (r =.06). The findings indicate that teachers who experience higher levels of state anxiety when confronted with warning signs of potential violence are better able to identify low-severity warning signs than do their less anxious counterparts, without over-identifying nonthreatening information as potential warning signs.