Research on Job Stress and Stress Coping of Vocational High School Students in Food and Beverage Departments at Cooperative Education Program in Taiwan

Abstract

The purpose of this research is to investigate the job stresses and stress coping of vocational high school students in Food and Beverage Departments at cooperative education program in Taiwan. The valid questionnaires in this study were collected from 291 vocational high schools students in Taiwan. Job stress scale questionnaire is based and adapted by Cartwright and Cooper's questionnaire (1997). For the stress coping scale questionnaire, it is based and adapted by Lazarus and Folkman's questionnaire (1984). Data were analyzed through statistics methods such as descriptive statistics, one sample t-test, one-way ANOVA and Pearson correlation coefficient. The conclusions are as below. 1. The job stress that vocational high school students feel is at middle-low level. 2. The coping strategy for job stress of vocational high school students is at middle-high level. 3. For the different departments and job stress, via the single-factor analysis of variance, it shows a significant difference (p ＜0.05), meaning that working in a food companies bears more stresses than that in tourist hotels and Chinese/western or Japanese restaurants. 4. For the job stress of internship in different departments, via one-way analysis of variance, showing a significant difference (p ＜0.05). It means working in both the kitchen and restaurant services is much more stressful.