Gender Differences in Perceived Sources of Stress: A Cross Sectional Survey of Public Secondary School Teachers in Ebonyi State, Nigeria

Abstract

Individuals, especially teachers, who work in serving professions involving interaction with other people, may be more liable to suffer psychological discomfort as a result of stress. However, the level of stress suffered may be dependent on the sources that generate the stress. The study, therefore, was conducted to determine the perceived sources of stress among male and female public secondary school teachers in Ebonyi state. The descriptive survey research design was adopted for the study. The population of the study was 4,360. A sample size of 436 (male 220, female 216) teachers participated in the study. This sample size was arrived following the suggestions of Nwana (2014) that if the population of a study is in a few thousands, 10% could be used. A self-developed questionnaire titled: Sources of Stress Questionnaire (SSQ) was used as instrument for data collection. The instrument was subjected to face validation by five experts in the field of Health Education and Psychology. The reliability of the instrument was computed using Cronbach alpha procedure which yielded a coefficient of 0.81. Data collected for the study were analyzed using mean and standard deviation. Independent samples t-test was used to test the hypothesis at an alpha level of 0.05. The results revealed that the public secondary school teachers in Ebonyi state studied had a high level stress which was perceived to have been generated by administrative-related, workload-related, environmental-related and economic-related sources. It was recommended that government should improve the working condition of the teachers in order to scale down their stress levels.