The Relationship between Primary School Teachers’ Coping Styles with Stress and Humor Styles

Abstract

Introduction. Educational problems may create stressful environment and thus decrease the efficiency of education. That is why the teachers must give importance to coping with stress and that is why it is very important to give support to the teachers. At the same time, searching teachers' coping styles with stress is of great importance. In recent years, humor is also started to be used as an effective tool in coping with stress and has turned out to be an interesting subject. It is thought in the cultures of many places in the world that humor is beneficial to physical and psychological health, humor develops interpersonal relations, humor decreases the stress and thus humor contributes much to life quality of the individuals (İlhan, 2005). There are many findings supporting that humor is beneficial to psychological health (Bennett & Lengacher, 2006). Martin and Lefcourt (1983) reported that pioneers of psychological health saw a link between humor and psychological health. Not only should humor be considered an enjoyable addition in the workplace, but also it benefits the human body by promoting health and physical healing, reducing stress and anxiety, and increasing hopefulness (Hurren, 2006). Today the teachers employed in primary schools as in all of the organizations also face emotional troubles because of various stress sources. There is little research related to the relationships between humor styles of primary school teachers and their coping styles with stress. Method. As a correlational research, this study investigated the relationships between primary school teachers' perceptions of coping styles with stress and their humor styles. The predicted variables of the study are teachers' coping styles with stress (self-confident, optimistic, helpless, submissive and seeking of social support coping styles) and predictor variables are the humor styles of the teachers (self-enhancing, affiliative, aggressive and selfdefeating humor styles). The population of the study is teachers who work in primary schools in Ankara and the study sample consists of 221 teachers who are selected from these schools with the convenience sampling method. The ‘Scale of Coping with Stress' (SCS) developed by Şahin ve Durak (1995) and the ‘Humor Styles Questionnaire' (HSQ) adapted by Yerlikaya (2003) were used. Internal consistence coefficients related to the SCS were found .61 for self-confident style, .55 for optimistic style, .52 for helpless Stresle Başa Çıkma ve Mizah Tarzları style, .59 for submissive style, and .46 for seeking of social support. Internal coefficients of the HSQ were .70 for self-enhancing, .66 for affiliative, .for aggressive, and .64 for self-defeating style. Data analysis was carried out mainly in two stages. In the first stage, the data transmitted to a computer was analyzed in terms of missing or incorrect value, inconsistent and multivariate value. In the second stage of the study, the sub problems were analyzed. In order to analyze the sub problems of the study, primarily by calculating arithmetic mean of the items in each sub-scale, a score for that factor was calculated.Analyses were made on the factor scores. Pearson correlations and multiple linear regression analysis were performed to analyze the data. Results. Results indicated that teachers use affiliative style of humor and seeking of social support and self-confident style of coping with stress much more than the other styles. Significant relationships were found between self-confident style of coping with stress and all of the humor styles (p < .05). While self-confident style was positively related to self-enhancing (r = .33, p < .01) and affiliative humor style (r = .40, p <.01), it is negatively related to aggressive (r = -.37, p < .01) and self-defeating humor style (r = - .23, p < .01). In addition, positive relationship was found between optimistic style of coping with stress and self-enhancing (r = .36, p < .01) and affiliative humor style (r = .29, p < .01). Results showed that all of the humor styles were the significant predictors of self-confident style in coping with stress. While self-enhancing (β = .30, p < .01) and affiliative humor style (β = .21, p < .01) positively predicted self-confident style, aggressive (β = -.17, p < .05) and selfdefeating humor style (β = -.20, p < .01) were the negative predictors. According to the Results of the analysis, self-enhancing (β = .33, p < .01) and aggressive humor style (β = -.18, p < .05) significantly predicted optimistic style of coping with the stress. Self-defeating style of humor (β = .16, p < .05) was the only significant predictor of helpless style. Discussion and conclusion. Teachers with high levels of affiliative humor style seemed to prefer more ‘self-confident' style and ‘seeking of social support' and less ‘helpless' style than those with a low levels of affiliative humor style. Similarly, teachers with high levels of self-enhancing humor style seemed to prefer more ‘optimistic' and ‘self-confident' styles and less ‘helpless' and ‘submissive' styles than those with a low levels of selfenhancing humor style. Conversely, teachers with high levels of aggressive humor style seemed to prefer more ‘submissive' style and less confident' and ‘optimistic' styles than those with low levels of aggressive humor style. Finally, teachers with high levels of self-defeating humor style seemed to prefer more ‘helpless' and ‘submissive' styles than those with low levels of self-defeating humor style. As a conclusion, positive or negative meaningful relationships between humor styles and coping styles with stress show that humor is a significant variable in coping with stress. Teachers who have unhealthy and incompatible humor styles (aggressive and self-defeating style) don't have healthy coping styles and these teachers also resort much to inefficient coping styles. It may be suggested that social and cultural facilities that enable teachers much more colleague and administrator support must be increased in the school in order to ease teachers' stress coping. By increasing teachers' awareness of this issue, their ability to use humor as a coping strategy can be improved. The more detailed investigation of the relationships between humor styles and stress coping styles in the context of cause and effect can offer significant contributions to literature. Similar studies can be done by taking school principals and other educational administrators at various institutions into the scope of research.

Keywords

• teacher , humor , humor styles , stress , coping with stress

İlköğretim Okulu Öğretmenlerinin Stresle Başa Çıkma Tarzları ile Kullandıkları Mizah Tarzları Arasındaki İlişki

Öz

Bu araştırmanın amacı, ilköğretim okulu öğretmenlerinin stresle başa çıkma tarzları ile kullandıkları mizah tarzları arasındaki ilişkiyi incelemektir. Korelasyonel bir araştırma olan bu çalışmaya, Ankara'daki ilköğretim okullarından uygun örnekleme yoluyla seçilen 221 öğretmen katılmıştır. Veri toplama aracı olarak ‘Stresle Başa Çıkma Tarzları Ölçeği' ve ‘Mizah Tarzları Ölçeği' kullanılmıştır. Verilerin analizi için Pearson korelasyon katsayıları hesaplanmış ve çoklu doğrusal regresyon analizi uygulanmıştır. Analiz sonuçları, tüm mizah tarzlarının stresle başa çıkmada kendine güvenli yaklaşımın anlamlı yordayıcıları olduğunu göstermiştir. Kendine güvenli yaklaşım, kendini geliştirici ve katılımcı mizah tarzları ile pozitif ilişkili bulunurken, saldırgan ve kendini yıkıcı mizah tarzları ile negatif ilişkili bulunmuştur.Stresle başa çıkmada iyimser yaklaşım, kendini geliştirici mizah tarafından pozitif yönde yordanırken, saldırgan mizah tarafından negatif yönde yordanmıştır. Bulgular, sağlıklı mizah tarzlarına (katılımcı ve kendini geliştirici) sahip öğretmenlerin aynı zamanda sağlıklı başa çıkma tarzlarını daha fazla kullandıklarını göstermiştir.

Anahtar Kelimeler

• öğretmen , mizah , mizah tarzları , stres , stresle başa çıkma

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