Study Of Occupational Stress Conditions And Influencing Factors Of Secondary School Teachers In Shanghai

Teaching is always considered as one of the most stressful professions. Since the mid-20th century, the study abroad on teacher stress has become the focus of education and psychology. This research, based on the survey of 248 teachers in Shanghai public middle school system, tries to reveal the level and sources of teacher's professional stress, and discover the relationship between teacher's professional stress and demographic variables, the level of teacher's mental health and teacher's personality. The result of the research suggests the following.1. 50.8 % of the teachers in the survey rate being a teacher as very stressful while 7.7 % of the teachers rate as extremely stressful. These display the fact that generally speaking, teaching is full of stressful.2. A principal components analysis of the sources of stress reveals seven factors labelled: relationship with others, workload, school administration, students learning results, need for self-development, time pressure and the teaching conditions.This has confirmed that stress in teaching is multidimensional.3. Teachers' professional stress is extremely correlated with mental health.Among the indexes of meantal health,mal-adaption,anxiety and strain are correlated significantly with stress,and angry is extremely correlated with stress.Female teachers have a worse mental health than that of male teachers.Teachers1 professional stress is extremely correlated with neuroticism.4. Workload and subjects of teaching are the most outstanding: the more workload, the higher stress level a teacher may reach; teachers of Chinese, maths and English suffer more stress than those teaching other subjects.In order to relieve teacher stress, teachers have to take an active role in learning and practising effective ways of stress management; school authorities must take seriously the special features of stress in different teaching stages and what teachers need, and thus provide them with adequate supports; education executive departments should pay more attention to teacher stress, and the reform of the curriculum and administration should be appropriate to the situations of different schools; at the sametime the staff and service of professional psychological help should be available to teachers, so should the effective pre- and post-professional training programs and the training programs of teaching methodologies. All above is effective in the relief of teacher stress and protection of their health.