Anxiety and Depression among School Principals – Warning, Principalship Can Be Hazardous to Your Health
| Date | 01 September 1994 |
| Pages | 18-34 |
| Published date | 01 September 1994 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/09578239410063094 |
| Author | Adrian Carr |
| Subject Matter | Education |
Journal of
Educational
Administration
32,3
18
Anxiety and Depression
among School Principals –
Warning, Principalship Can
Be Hazardous to Your Health
Adrian Carr
University of Western Sydney, Nepean, Australia
While stress and burnout have become established topics in educational research in recent
years, teachers have received more attention than administrators. In a recent and extensive
review on teacher stress for example, Hiebert (1985) included a short “Note on School
Administrators”, which referenced only three empirical studies... Not only are there few
studies of stress among principals, but the results of existing studies conflict. Especially
problematic is the level of stress reported among principals[1].
A review of past research into stress among school personnel and principals in
particular would reveal information whose usefulness must be considered
problematic. Many of the results and conclusions are contradictory – there are
significant flaws in the methodologies that have been used, there is a lack of
uniformity in the conceptualization of the term stress, the explicit theoretical
framework (if stated) is often ambiguous and/or open to conjecture, and most
studies concentrate on self-report and quantitative/“quick measure” approaches.
I had been counselling education workers in relation to a variety of industrial,
legal and professional matters as an employee of the teachers’ union (the South
Australian Institute of Teachers) since 1978 and became frustrated as a
“counsellor”, by the lack of insight that the research literature provided in
relation to stress among school principals. Prompted largely by this inadequacy
in the literature and by the experiences of the school principals who had come
to me seeking advice in relation to stress they were experiencing, I recently
undertook an exploratory study[2] to gain some insight into the extent and
sources of stress among school principals. Before discussing the results of this
research, I would like to draw attention to what appear to be major
inadequacies with much of the past research in the area of “stress”, as it was
from such inadequacies that a new line of enquiry was adopted in the study.
The Inadequacy of Past Research into Stress among School
Principals
Methodologies
The typical job stress study can be characterized as follows: questionnaire respondents are
asked to report their perceptions of job conditions which the researcher has a priori labelled
as stressful (e.g. role conflict). Next, in the same questionnaire, respondents are asked to report
their job-related affected states. Then, the relationship between “stressful” job condition
perceptions and job-related effective states is statistically ascertained; and, so long as the
Journal of Educational
Administration, Vol. 32 No. 3, 1994,
pp. 18-34. © MCBUniversity Press,
0957-8234
Anxiety,
Depression and
Principals
19
detected relationship is statistically significant, the researcher concludes that a source of job
stress (or a job stressor) has been identified. Variants of this research strategy are evident.
Perceptions of job conditions which supposedly are stress inhibitors or reducers (eg. social
support and participation) may be gauged as well as various individual difference
characteristics of the respondents (eg. locus of control and tenure). These other perceived job
conditions and respondent characteristics are then analytically treated as potential
moderators of the job stressor - job strain relationship. Most definitely, this description is not
applicable to all job stress research; but, the description does seem to capture the bulk of the
research published on the topic by organizational scientists[3].
The description of the “typical job stress study”, while aimed at the general
research literature, is just as applicable to past studies of stress, anxiety and
depression among school principals. Some of these studies have determined a
respondent’s degree of stress through a self-report to a question such as “in
general how stressful do you find your work?” (see for example [4]). Others have
used a more extensive questionnaire (see for example [5,6]), with some
researchers taking such self-report responses to a general question about “how
stressful do you find your work?” and correlating that response with answers to
questions related to physiological symptoms of stress (see for example[7,8]). A
rarer methodology has involved supplementing a 15-item index of Job-related
Strain questionnaire with questions developed from a sample of principals
using a diary to detail actual stressful incidents over a period of a week[9]. One
other methodology that has been used in past studies of principals has be en the
Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI)[4,10].
Studies of stress among school principals to varying degrees use
methodologies that suffer from one or more of the following problems:
●confounding the level of stress with sources of stress;
●vulnerability to attribution errors;
●the construct validity of the instrument being used may be questionable.
In relation to the first of these problems, i,e. confounding the level of stress with
sources of stress, it is seldom the case that the level of stress and sources of
stress are measured independently and then correlated with the respondent.
Schonfeld[11, pp. 321-38], in recently reviewing research into stress among
school teachers, has also identified this problem. He reports that:
Many investigators treat teacher stress as a gestalt-like entity, which includes both stressor
and distress...Typically, teachers respond to questionnaire items that identify stressful
conditions by their distressing effects. For example , items tend to have a structure such as that
used by Kyriacou and Sutcliffe (1978, 1979): “As a teacher, how great a source of stress are
these factors to you? Maintaining class discipline; Shortage of equipment ...”
Responses to such items also fail to assess the extent to which the teacher is actually confronted
by potential stressors. It is possible, given the ambiguity of the item, for a science teacher to
respond that he or she would find an equipment shortage highly stressful although equipment
shortages occur only rarely, and are, thus, of minor consequence.
By using items that simultaneously assess stressor and distress, the investigator abdicates to
the subjects the role of testing hypotheses concerning what constitutes morale – or health-
damaging stressors in work settings. More important, a respondent’s appraisal of the
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