| Research on teacher stress has become a major area of international research interest but its relationship with the changing school external environment is rarely examined. This study is to address the effect of school external environmental constraints, school settings, and personal characteristics (including health condition) on teacher stress in a sample of 543 public primary and secondary school teachers.;In the present study, external constraints are studied by means of a revised Lam's School Environmental Constraint Instrument (SECI). The result is a bit different in Hong Kong compared with those elsewhere. Five dimensions are identified: cultural linguistic orientation, funding and resources, social values, demography, and policy control. For teacher stress, it is assessed by a modified Hui and Chan's Teacher Stress Scale (TSS), originally developed for Hong Kong context. There are six domains discovered: school management and administration (SMA), workload and time pressure (WTP), managing guidance work (MGW), managing students' behaviour and learning (MSB), guidance work support (GWS), and working relationships (WRS). In order to analyze the effect of some personal factors, a simplified Type A Personality Checklist and a Health Condition Checklist with physiological, cognitive and emotional health symptoms are also developed. Based on the analytic results of the survey questionnaires, some insights are provided in respect of the relative influence of the above factors on teacher stress. These are complemented by an in-depth case study of two primary and two secondary teachers with high and low stress level. This integration of quantitative and qualitative approach can ultimately enrich the research outcomes.;To sum up the quantitative analyses, school external constraints, school settings, teachers' health condition and their personal characteristics were all found to have some significant effect on teacher stress in six domains. As the findings of the present study revealed that their effect on teacher stress in respect of primary and secondary school level were different, a separate scrutiny of the results were done. For primary level, cultural linguistic orientation, funding and resources, social values, policy control, banding of school, emotional symptoms, cognitive symptoms, physiological symptoms, age, religion, teacher training, teaching experience at present school, and rank at school had significant predicting power. And for secondary level, cultural linguistic orientation, funding and resources, social values, demography, policy control, school type, medium of instruction adopted by school, banding of school, emotional symptoms, cognitive symptoms, age, marital status, religion, total teaching experience, guidance status, rank at school, and personality type were all found to be significant in predicting teacher stress.;Based on the result in qualitative analysis, teachers should strengthen their inner resources in terms of thought awareness, self-confidence, and way of attribution. They should also get used to humor and practicing some types of relaxation exercises. Most importantly, the responsibility of identifying the causes of stress and taking them in control is theirs.;Hopefully, plans for future initiatives can be executed with more social support for teachers, a fact supported by other research. Teachers should appreciate that there is a support across various parties (educational psychologists, school development officers, subject inspectors, professionals in tertiary institutions, parents, interest groups, principals, senior teachers, and individual teachers) which at the present are under-utilized. |
