Revista Argentina de Clínica Psicológica 2020, Vol. XXIX, N°1, 1345-1350
DOI: 10.24205/03276716.2020.194 1345
C
ORRELATION AMONG
M
ENTAL
H
EALTH
,
W
ORK
S
TRESS AND
J
OB
B
URNOUT OF
R
URAL
T
EACHERS
Sheliang Li
Abstract
The rural-urban gap in education is a universal problem. There is a severe lack of rural teachers in many countries. Currently, most rural teachers in China are working under immense work pressure, which greatly affects their mental health. This paper aims to identify the correlation among mental health, work stress and job burnout of rural teachers, laying the basis for improving their mental health. Based on psychological capital (PsyCap) model, the author carried out a questionnaire survey in a rural primary school of southeastern China’s Jiangxi Province. The survey data were analyzed on the Matlab to disclose how demographic variables of rural teachers, e.g. gender, age and educational background, affect the mental health, work stress and job burnout of the rural teachers, and to identify the correlation among the three factors. The results show that these demographic variables have great impacts on the mental health, work stress and job burnout of rural teachers; the mental health is negatively correlated with work stress and job burnout. This research provides theoretical parameters and data support for the management of rural teachers, and promotes the development of rural education in China.
Key words: Rural Teachers, Mental Health, Work Stress, Job Burnout.
Received: 09-02-19 | Accepted: 07-08-19
INTRODUCTION
Since the 20th century, along with the progress of urbanization, the rural economy of China has got great development, and at the same time, the rural education has begun to enter a new period (Tang, Au, & Schmitz, 2001). According to statistics, in 2011, there were 1,780 compulsory education schools in rural areas, the number of rural students even reached 5.3 million and the number of staff was less than 100,000 (Lasalvia & Tansella, 2011). The growth rate of rural teachers lags far behind the vigorous development of rural education, so their tasks are becoming more and more burdensome. They not only need to teach students basic science, professional skills and the ways of life, but also bear the pressure of
Northwestern Polytechnical University, School of Management, Xi’an 710072, China.
E-Mail: [email protected]
scientific research tasks. Hence, burnout emotion and state will gradually appear among rural teachers, which will seriously affect the training and cultivation process of talents. It has been urgent to study teachers' mental health and job burnout (Dreison, Luther, Bonfils et al., 2016).
In the 1980s, American scholar Larson first gave the definition of psychological capital, thinking that psychological capital is the positive psychological quality of personal health, and can subconsciously promote individuals to produce behaviors that are beneficial to themselves and others (Speed, Wood, Chawla et al., 2004). Letcher began to apply psychological principles to the incentive system of human compensation system, and pointed out that healthy psychological quality, such as expectation, positive attitude and perseverance, affects employees' behaviors, performance, and the sense of belonging to the organization. (Hannigan, Edwards, Coyle et al., 2000). Based
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on the basic principles of psychology, Darity established a psychological capital model (PCM), which divides healthy psychological capital into four personality characteristics, including hope, perseverance, confidence and persistence (Carlson & Thompson, 1995). Karl thinks that excessive work stress will lead to mental health problems such as anxiety among educators through a lot of literature research and if this mental state cannot be effectively alleviated for a long time, it will inevitably lead to a significant decrease in teachers' work enthusiasm and thus result in a psychological phenomenon of job burnout (Russell,Altmaier, & Velzen, 1987). On the other hand, Patterson found that the lack of internal psychological capital of most enterprise employees easily leads to the workers' working mood, work withdrawal psychology, and finally the psychological behavior of job burnout. Marrion made an in-depth study of the improvement of active psychological quality on job burnout through on-the-spot questionnaire survey, and found that psychological capital such as expectation is negatively correlated to job burnout while the overall psychological capital of employees can better predict the job burnout of teachers than single factors such as cognition, perseverance expectation and self-esteem and can well evaluate the work stress of teachers (Luthans et al., 2006). Based on the big data analysis, Jensen concluded that the average level of psychological capital of the educators in higher education schools in China is at the middle level, among which the scores in the dimensions of perseverance and initiative are low, and also analyzed the influence of gender, educational background and marital status on teachers' mental health and job burnout (Ray & Miller, 1991). Betoret obtained the job burnout of the educators in a primary and middle school in Hubei province through the on-the-spot questionnaire survey and based on the Lee's scale, and combined it with the concept of psychological capital to expound the mechanism of healthy psychological quality in improving teachers' job burnout (Zhong, You, Gan et al., 2009).
At present, scholars have made more achievements in the research on psychological capital of higher education workers, but the research on the relationship between rural teachers' mental health and job burnout is still insufficient, for example, the uncertainty of influencing factors of mental health and the
impact of psychological capital on staff’s work
stress, organizational performance, and a sense of team ownership have not been studied in depth (Vinokur, Pierce, Lewandowski-Romps et al., 2011). At present, how to develop and initiate the good mental state and potential psychological resources of rural teachers, help teachers' teams to relieve work pressure and improve the quality of rural education has become a new challenge for school management teams and ministries of education (White, Aalsma, Holloway et al., 2015).
Based on the theory of psychological capital model and taking Guangming Primary School in Dongkeng Village, Jiangxi Province as an example, this paper studies the influence of demographic variables of rural teachers, such as gender, age and educational background, on mental health, work stress and job burnout by means of questionnaire survey and Matlab mathematical statistics and then analyzes the correlation between mental health, work stress and job burnout. This study points out the direction of rural teachers' mental health management and promotes the rapid development of rural education in China.
DESIGN OF EMPIRICAL RESEARCH SCHEME
Psychological capital scale, job burnout scale and work stress scale
Based on Darity’s psychological capital model (PCM), the study determines that the mental health of educators is mainly composed of three dimensions: expectation, positivity and perseverance, and designs the psychological capital scale thereby, in which six items on "expectation" raised by famous scholars can be generally applied to different types of educators; the "positivity" part of the scale contains 10 life - oriented items; the "perseverance" part refers to 14 items that Black and others have studied and designed. According to the statistical principle, the measure of mental health is the statistical value of the standard scores on the three variables such as expectation, positivity and perseverance. The scales include 5 grades: excellent, good, medium, qualified and poor, corresponding to 5 scores, 4 scores, 3 scores, 2 scores and 1 score respectively. Similarly, the job burnout scale was designed on the basis of a questionnaire designed by Professor Hassan to study job burnout. The scale contains 6 items, which are also assessed at 5 grades. The work
CORRELATION AMONG MENTAL HEALTH, WORK STRESS AND JOB BURNOUT OF RURAL TEACHERS 1347
Table 1.
Basic information of questionnaire
Demographic variable Number of persons Percentage
Gender Male 68 52%
Female 64 48%
Age
20-30 years old 24 18%
30-40 years old 70 53%
Over the of age 40 38 29%
Marital status Married 90 68%
Unmarried 42 32%
Educational level
College degree and below 20 15%
Bachelor degree 89 67%
Master and above 23 18%
Position
Grass-roots staff 62 47%
Grass-roots managers 42 32%
Middle managers 24 18%
Senior management 4 3%
Duration of service
Less than 1 year. 10 8%
1-5 years 78 59%
5-9 years 38 %
More than 9 years 6 4%
pressure scale is designed according to Professor Richard's standard scale.
In order to make it convenient for rural teachers to read and collect questionnaires, the study integrates psychological capital, work pressure and job burnout into a scale, which includes five components such as preface, basic demographic data, psychological capital, work pressure, and job burnout, with a total of 40 items.
Basic demographic data
Taking Guangming Primary School in Dongkeng Village of Jiangxi Province as a typical case, 150 rural teachers are given questionnaires, which are answered and submitted on the spot in order to improve the collection rate of questionnaires. A total of 150 questionnaires are distributed, 138 were collected and 132 arere valid. The demographic data of rural teachers is shown in Table 1.
INFLUENCE OF DEMOGRAPHIC VARIABLES ON MENTAL HEALTH, WORK STRESS AND JOB BURNOUT
Gender
According to the scores of "mental health," "work stress" and "job burnout" of rural teachers, the mathematical expectation is solved by Matlab software. The influence of different genders on the scores of "mental health," "work stress" and "job burnout" is shown in Figure 1. The results in Figure 1 show that gender has
a statistically significant influence on mental health, work stress, and job burnout. The score of male rural teachers in mental health dimension is lower than that of female, which indicates that female is better than male in mental health such as expectation, positivity and perseverance. On the other hand, the score of male is higher than that of female in work stress and job burnout, which shows that the work stress of male rural teachers is higher than that of female, and thus the trend of job burnout of male rural teachers is more serious than that of female.
Figure 1
.
The influence of gender on the
scores of different dimensions
Age
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"mental health," "work stress" and "job burnout" is statistically analyzed, as shown in Figure 2.
Figure 2
.
The influence of different age
groups on the scores of different
dimensions
Figure 2 shows that age has a statistically significant influence on mental health and work stress, but has little influence on job burnout. The score of rural teachers in mental health dimensions decreases with the increase of age, which indicates that the older they are, the longer they are working, and the less healthy they are in the aspects of healthy psychology such as expectation, positivity, and perseverance. On the other hand, rural teachers aged 30-40 are significantly more stressed at work than rural teachers aged 20-30 and over 40. The reason is that the pressure of family life and job promotion is increasing at the same time for people aged 30-40, while the willingness of older rural teachers to pursue money and jobs has dropped significantly, so their work pressure is also the lowest. Finally, in terms of job burnout, rural teachers of different age groups are at the same level, and there is no significant difference, indicating that age is not the main factor affecting job burnout.
Educational background
The scores on "mental health," "work stress" and "job burnout" of rural teachers with different educational background are classified and counted, and the results are shown in Figure 3.
Figure 3 shows that the influence of different
educational background on mental health, work stress and job burnout is statistically significant. The score of rural teachers in mental health dimension decreases with the increase of educational background, which indicates that the higher the educational background is, the lower the mental health of rural teachers such as expectation, positivity and perseverance is. Due to the long-term impact of academic stress, the rural teachers with higher educational background undergo more work stress, which further results in more serious job burnout psychology of rural teachers with higher educational background.
Figure 3
.
The influence of education on the
score of different dimensions
MODEL ESTABLISHMENT AND CORRELATION ANALYSIS
Establishment of psychological structure model for rural teachers
Based on the above data analysis and the theory of psychological capital, a psychological structure model of rural teachers is established. The model framework is shown in Figure 4.
Analysis of correlation between health psychology such as expectation, positivity and perseverance with work stress and job burnout
The data of 132 valid questionnaires are counted with Matlab software to analyze the correlation between health psychology of rural teachers and its components such as expectation, positivity and perseverance with their work stress and job burnout. The results are shown in table 2.
CORRELATION AMONG MENTAL HEALTH, WORK STRESS AND JOB BURNOUT OF RURAL TEACHERS 1349
Figure 4
.
The framework of psychological structure model of rural teachers
Table 2.
The correlation matrix among healthy psychology, work stress and job burnout
Variables Expectation Enthusiasm Perseverance Healthy psychology Work stress Job burnout
Expectation —— 0.06 0.246 0.533 -0.108 -0.108
Enthusiasm 0.06 —— 0.043 0.338 -0.045 -0.045
Perseverance 0.246 0.043 —— 0.732 -0.314 -0.314
Healthy psychology 0.533 0.338 0.732 —— -1.795 -1.932
Work stress -0.108 -0.045 -0.314 -1.795 —— 2.643
Job burnout -0.112 -0.053 -0.362 -1.932 2.643 ——
According to Table 2, first, the correlation coefficient between Expectation and Work pressure is -0.108, that between Positivity and Work pressure is -0.045, and that between Perseverance and Work pressure is -0.314, all of which show a negative correlation. As a result, the correlation coefficient between mental health and work stress is -1.795, which indicates a significant negative correlation between
mental health and work stress, that’s, the higher
their mental health is, the lower work stress they have.
Second, the correlation coefficient between Expectation and Job burnout is -0.112, that between Positivity and Job burnout is -0.053, that between Perseverance and Job burnout is -0.362, which show a negative correlation. As a result, the correlation coefficient between mental health and job burnout is -1.932, which indicates a significant negative correlation
between mental health and job burnout, that’s,
the lower their mental health is, the more obvious job burnout psychology they have.
Third, the correlation coefficient between work stress and job burnout is 2.643, which indicates a significant positive correlation
between work stress and job burnout, that’s, the
more work stress they have, the more obvious the job burnout psychology they have.
CONCLUSIONS
Based on the theory of psychological capital model, taking Guangming Primary School in Dongkeng Village, Jiangxi Province as an example, this paper studies the influence of demographic variables of rural teachers, such as gender, age and educational background, on mental health, work stress and job burnout by means of questionnaire survey and Matlab mathematical statistics and then analyzes the correlation between mental health, work stress and job burnout. The conclusions are as follows: (1) There is a significant correlation between the mental health of rural teachers and its constituent elements and job burnout, which is
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reflected in the negative correlation between the positive psychological quality of educators, such as expectation, positivity and perseverance, and job burnout. This shows that the lower the level of mental health of rural teachers us, the more obvious job burnout psychology they have. (2) There is a significant negative correlation between the health psychology of rural teachers
and their work stress, that’s, the higher the
degree of mental health they have, the lower the work stress they have. At the same time, there is a significant positive correlation between work stress and job burnout, which indicates that the increase of work stress will lead to the psychological behavior of job burnout in rural teachers, which explains the negative correlation between the mental health of rural teachers and their job burnout.
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