Occupational stress and its associated factors among school teachers in Rural Karnataka: A cross sectional study

Abstract

Teachers play a vital role in the society by helping students acquire knowledge and moral values. The objectives of our study were to measure the occupational stress and factors associated with them among school teachers. A cross sectional study was conducted among 102 teachers using eight item, pretested, semi-structured, face-validated questionnaire to assess the factors contributing to occupational stress and scored on a scale of 8-16 with a higher score depicting lower stress. In this study, 35(34.3%) teachers were in the age group of 22-31 years, 72(70.6%) were males, 73(59.8%) were working for more than 5 years, 68(66.7%) were permanent employees, little less than half 42(41.2%) had completed Post-Graduation. The mean occupational stress was 10.8 + 0.96. Factors like male gender, number of classes per day, work distribution, work pressure, strength of the class, duration of travel to work place and job satisfaction had significant impact on work related stress.