Stress Spectrum: A screening tool for special education educators

Dr.Sidra Afzal,Dr.Inam Ul Haq,Dr.Sadia Saleem,Dr.Zahid Mehmood

Abstract

Stress is a dynamic state in which a person is faced with a demand, opportunity, or restriction pertaining to what they want and for which the outcome is seen as both significant and unknown. Each person's perception and response to stressful situations may differ. To quantify the extent to which a person is under the influence of stress has been a source of attraction for researchers for ages. However, there are no developed indigenous measures to assess occupational stress among teachers working in the special education sector. Therefore, the current study aims to develop a scale to identify the domains of stress among special education educators. The current study lays it foundation on quantitative research design. The Special Education Teachers Stress Scale (SETSS) is developed in three stages. In Stage I, the phenomenology of stress was collated from different sources to generate the item pool. Empirical validation from the relevant field experts on the list of items was derived in Stage II. Stage III focuses on establishing the scale's reliability, and Stage IV talks about the sensitivity, specificity, cutoff scores of SETSS. Cross sectional study design was used to identify the stressors, its domains, phenomenology and associated factors among special education teachers both in government and private sectors. Findings revealed that two factors were similar to the existing tools for measuring teachers' stress, i.e., Workload and disciplinary/behavioral issues of the children. Interviews revealed that role ambiguity, excessive paperwork, dealing with a higher number of students with varying issues, and institutional politics were significant sources of stress for the teachers. However, lack of support from parents and individual attention were the factors identified as unique to the Pakistani sample.