PECULIARITIES OF TEACHERS’ COPING STRATEGIES

This research aims to reveal teachers’ stress coping peculiarities. It was identifi ed that teachers most often used planful problem solving and accepting responsibility, while escaping-avoidance and confrontation were used most rarely. Female teachers used all coping strategies more often than male teachers. Succession of frequency of coping strategies in male and female groups differs. Senior women use confrontation and distancing coping more rarely than younger women. The specifi city of frequency of coping strategies, considering the delivered subject, was disclosed.


Introduction
Several tendencies could be distinguished in the researches on teachers' stress.One of them is researches into teachers' stress, analysing the so-called external stressors.It was identifi ed that main sources of the teacher's stress were: too heavy workload, problems in cooperation with colleagues, poor administration and management (Kyriacou, 2001), too many roles (Austin, Shah, & Muncer, 2005), lack of support, excessive social expectations, lack of autonomy (Punch & Tuettemann, 1990), constantly changing requirements, too much of bureaucracy (paperwork), too little work with the class (Moriarity, Edmonds, Blatcford, & Martin, 2001), pupils' problematic behaviour, bad working conditions, lack of time (Abel & Sewell, 1999), etc.
Another tendency of researches on stress is researches on peculiarities of the very teacher's personality, determining intensity of the teacher's experienced stress.It is indicated that teachers themselves have a number of irrational beliefs that may contribute to emergence of stress (Forman, 1990;Bernard & Joyce, 1984).The ones to be mentioned are irrational beliefs expecting constant support and assistance from the environment.Other irrational beliefs are teachers' expectations that pupils must always behave properly, that there should be no negative emotions and confl icts at school, that parents are responsible for pupils' behaviour, the teacher cannot make mistakes, etc.
One more group of researches into stress goes deep into the analysis of stress coping strategies and mechanisms.Stress coping is understood as the individual's efforts, manifesting themselves at the behavioural and cognitive level, to cope with external and internal requirements when the existing resources are already exhausted or insuffi cient (Lazarus, 1993).The term coping is used irrespective of effectiveness or adaptivity of employed efforts.Lazarus (1993) distinguishes two main functions of coping: functions directed to the problem and functions directed to emotions.Problem-focused efforts are directed to solving the situation, changing the relation with the stressful event.The function of emotion-focused coping is to help to cope with arisen emotions without changing the stressful situation.Other authors (Carver, Schneider, & Weintraub, 1989) assess adaptivity and non-adaptivity of coping.They distinguish three groups of coping strategies: problem-focused stress coping, stress coping focused on seeking emotional support and non-adaptive stress coping.Concretising stress coping methods, the following key fi elds of stress coping are detailed.This way theoretical stress coping models containing four, eight factors emerge (Bouchard, Sabourn, Lusser, Wright, & Richer, 1997).In this research the theoretical stress coping model containing eight factors will be followed (Lazarus, 1993).Researches into teachers' stress coping result in identifi cation of links between stress coping strategies and the burnout syndrome (Griva & Joekes, 2003), emotional intelligence, satisfaction with life (Ignat, 2010), experienced stress (Hung, 2011;Austin et al., 2005, Bulotait & Lepeškien , 2006).
Thus, researches on teachers' stress peculiarities and its coping strategies show the importance and relevance of the analysed problem.The teacher's work requires both certain professional skills and competencies, subject knowledge and emotional and psychological stability.The reality of the teacher's work -spontaneity in the classroom, the society's attitude analysing the teacher's activities, the teacher's work that is valued not according to efforts and competencies but according to the achieved result (Parkay & Hardcaste, 1998) -enables to ascribe the teacher's work to the most stressful types of work in the group of professions person-person.Researches demonstrate that 40% of teachers experience serious stress symptoms, which appeared due to too big workload, unsatisfi ed and insulting pupils and their parents (Austin, et al., 2005).There is an increasing number of teachers who are forced to address for psychotherapeutic support due to experienced anxiety, depression, "burnout syndrome" and psychosomatic complaints.Therefore, relevance of preventive measures for teachers is increasing.These measures could help teachers to use adequate stress coping strategies.However, creation of such measures requires empirical researches on the teacher's experienced stress and coping strategies.There is a lack of such researches both in Lithuanian and foreign scientifi c space.
Thus, this research aims to identify peculiarities of the teacher's stress coping, considering sex, years of teaching experience, delivered subject and the type of school.
Research objectives: 1.To disclose teachers' stress coping peculiarities.2. To compare teachers' stress coping peculiarities with regard to gender, age, years of teaching experience, delivered subject, and type of school.
Research subject: teachers' stress coping
According to the type of school teachers were ascribed to the following groups: 38 (34%) basic school teachers; 45 (41%) secondary school teachers and 28 (25%) gymnasium teachers.
Research methods.Teachers' stress coping was assessed using Ways of Coping Questionnaire (Lazarus, 1993).The questionnaire was translated to and back by bilingual researchers.The questionnaire consists of 50 statements, which are grouped into 8 subscales: confrontive coping, self-controlling, seeking social support, accepting responsibility, planful problem solving, distancing, escape-avoidance, positive reappraisal.The respondent assessed every statement using Likert type scale according to frequency of usage: 0 -not used; 1 -used somewhat; 2 -used quite a bit; 3 -used a great deal.
Thus, key variables of this research are estimators of ways of coping stress.Additional variables are gender, age, job experience, type of school and delivered subject.Statistical analysis.Research data have been calculated employing 17.0 SPSS software.Links of stress coping indicators with sex, age, years of teaching experience were assessed using Spearmen correlation coeffi cient; comparison according to sex, type of school and delivered subject was made applying nonparametric Mann Whitney criteria.

Research Results and their Discussion Descriptives of Research on Coping and Discussion
Data of each scale are given in Table 1.As it can be seen, teachers of this sample most often cope with the stressful situation using planful problem solving (describe behaviour directed to the analysis of the situation, efforts to change the situation), leaving accepting responsibility (describe behaviour, when the individual is responsible for his/her actions, plans) in the second place, and slightly more rarely using seeking social support (describe behaviour seeking information, actual support, emotional support).Most rarely teachers respondents of this group use escape-avoidance (describe behaviour when the individual refuses to solve the emerged situation, trust in miracles, wishes, fantasies) and confrontation (describe behaviour when the individual expresses his/her wishes, feelings, ascribes responsibility to others).The respondents use self-controlling (describe efforts to control their feelings and actions), positive appraisal (disclose efforts to learn from the emerged situation, positively restructure experience) and distancing (efforts to distance, not to treat the emerged situation seriously) moderately often.This only partially corresponds to other authors' research results.It was identifi ed that the teachers' most frequently chosen coping strategy that coincided with the one of teachers of this sample was planful problem solving (Austin et.al., 2005).The most rarely used copingescape-avoidance -coincides too.The biggest differences are in usage frequencies of accepting responsibility and confrontive coping.Teachers of this sample signifi cantly more often use accepting responsibility and more rarely confronting than the said authors state.According to frequency of using coping strategies the results of teachers of this sample are closer to the data of research into families (Bouchard, et al. 1997).Frequency of using these coping strategies coincides: accepting responsibility, distancing, escape-avoidance, positive reappraisal.Usage of confrontation occupies an almost diametrically opposed position: Lithuanian teachers use it signifi cantly more rarely than the respondents who took part in the research of the said authors (Austin et al., 2005;Bouchard et al., 1997).Analogous researches into nursing in Portugal resulted in identifi cation of dominating self controlling, planful problem solving and seeking social support coping and most rarely used escape-avoidance and accepting responsibility (Laranjeira, 2011).Thus, we can speak both about inter-cultural differences and about specifi city of a professional activity in various cultures and possible health consequences caused by the employed coping strategy.Teachers of this sample, using planful problem solving, accepting responsibility, seeking social support more often and confrontation, more rarely, as if demonstrate the lack of manifestation of their needs, wishes.This would seem favourable for professional activities focused on the pupil and not on the teacher but at the same time this also shows insuffi cient identifi cation of limits of responsibility.In the educational process this could result in fewer opportunities for learners to be responsible for their behaviour and achievements.Therefore, further researches into coping could be more specifi ed, asking respondents about coping strategies used at work, relating coping strategies to professional deformation, etc.
As it can be seen from Table 2, weak statistically signifi cant relations between coping indicators dominate.Recorded very weak relations are statistically non-signifi cant.Positive reappraisal is related to seeking social support and planful problem solving by a moderately strong link.It can be assumed that seeking positive way out of the stressful situation, social support from the environment is used as well as situation analysis supplemented with its planned control.Accepting responsibility is related to self-controlling and escapeavoidance by the same moderately strong link too.Teachers' accepting responsibility means both bigger self-control and a pursuit to stand aside from the stressful situation, taking responsibility for this.There are two negative very weak links between escape-avoidance and planful problem solving and between distancing and social support.They explain the 56 contrary of used coping strategies because distancing from the situation also means a weaker contact with seeking social support and stressful problem solving.Thus, identifi ed links partially enable to verify validity of the content of the questionnaire.Besides, data given in Table 2 enable to evaluate how teachers, choosing one coping strategy, choose other coping strategies.It can be noticed that seeking social support and distancing are related to all other coping strategies; i.e., using one of these coping strategies, the teacher will be inclined to use all strategies.Positive reappraisal and confrontation correlate with the least number of coping strategies but their links are contradictory.The teacher, who more often uses positive reappraisal, uses other positive stressful situation coping strategies more often as well.The teacher, who more often uses confrontation, uses other negative stress coping strategies more often as well (distancing, escape avoidance).It could be considered that usage of constructive stress coping strategies activates usage of other constructive stress coping strategies and, analogically, usage of non-constructive stress coping strategy develops usage of other negative stress coping strategies.However, it can be noticed that with certain exceptions all stress coping strategies correlate with each other, including those ascribed to constructive and those ascribed to non-constructive.Hence, usage of certain one coping strategy, even if it is a positive coping strategy, does not ensure that the teacher will use other constructive strategies as well.However, it can be noticed that using constructive strategies, more varying stress coping strategies in general are used than in case of using non-constructive coping.This analysis of correlation coeffi cients verifi es the idea that stress coping strategies should not be distributed into constructive and non-constructive (Laranjeira, 2011).They should be assessed according to effectiveness, dealing with stressful situation.And this depends on personality traits and possibilities, on the very stressful situation.Sometimes non-constructive distancing can help to see the stressful situation from aside and later solve it successfully (Folkman, Lazarus, Dunkel-Shettler, Longis, & Gruen, 1986).

Results on Coping Ways according to Additional Variables and Discussion
Socio-demographic data show that female teachers dominate in this sample.Male-female ratio corresponds to the usual ratio in Lithuanian educational institutions.As it can be seen from Table 1, female teachers use all stress coping strategies more often than male teachers.Distribution of stress coping strategies according to frequency of usage coincides for fi rst two and two last positions.Women statistically signifi cantly more often use accepting responsibility than men (p<0,05).Escape-avoidance and confrontation are coping strategies that are used most rarely but women's usage indicators are higher than men's (p<0,05) in both cases.There are signifi cantly bigger differences in frequencies of using seeking social support and positive reappraisal.Although the latter is used by women more often, in the whole structure of used coping strategies positive reappraisal occupies a similar place as in the men's group.Meanwhile women use seeking social support more frequently than men and, moreover, in the general structure of using coping this coping occupies a higher position than in the men's group.This corresponds to the results of other researchers, who state that women more often use seeking social support (Chan & Hui, 1995).Although there are no statistical differences between men and women according to frequency of using distancing, but in the male teachers' group this coping is among the fi rst three most frequently used coping ways.In the female teachers' group this coping is among last three most rarely used coping strategies.This corresponds to the results of other researches of Lithuania (Bulotaite & Lepeškien , 2006) as well.Besides, these differences can be explained by psychological peculiarities of sexes.It is stated that women's social skills that are used seeking social support are better than men's.Men are more focused on activities, problem solving, and fi nd manifestation of emotions more diffi cult ( , 1996;Bouchard et al., 1997).Having identifi ed differences in frequencies of using stress coping strategies between men and women, further calculations are made in sex groups separately.There were no young adults among respondents in this sample, besides, the majority of those who fi lled in the questionnaire were second maturity teachers.Two signifi cant negative links of age with confrontation, distancing and a positive weekly expressed link with positive reappraisal and planful problem solving in female teachers' group were identifi ed (see Table 3).Based on that, it can be stated that the older the female teachers, the more rarely they use confrontation and distancing but they use positive reappraisal and planful problem solving more often than younger age female teachers.It means that as teachers grow older, constructive coping strategies start dominating and there are less non-constructive stress coping ways.Years of teaching experience partially refl ect frequency of using coping strategies with regard to age.The more years of teaching experience, the more rarely female teachers use confrontation and the more often they use positive reappraisal.In men's group no statistically signifi cant link with regard to age was identifi ed but there is a negative relation between years of teaching experience and frequency of using seeking social support (r= -0,44, p <0,05).This means that the more years of teaching experience, the less male teachers seek social support, information, etc. in case of a stressful situation.

Positive reappraisal
Age -0,35** -0,8 -0.02 -0,11 0,19* -0,21* -0,09 0,28* Job experience -0,29** -0,03 -0,14 -0,14 -0,13 -0,06 -0,10 0,25* ** Correlation is signifi cant at p < 0,001 (two tailed) * Correlation is signifi cant at p<0,05 (two tailed) The majority of teachers of this sample were secondary school teachers and the minority were from the gymnasium.Different types of schools not only raise specifi c requirements for the teacher but also determine stressful situations that are characteristic and specifi c to them.It can be maintained that teachers working in different types of schools can also apply different ways of coping with stress.It has been identifi ed that female teachers working in basic schools and gymnasiums and teachers working in secondary schools and gymnasiums do not differ according to frequency of any way of coping.Differences have been established between teachers of basic and secondary schools with regard to usage of self-controlling and accepting responsibility.Teachers of the basic school signifi cantly more often use self-controlling (U= 9,95; p<0,001) and accepting responsibility (U=4,31; p<0,05) coping than secondary school teachers.Partially this corresponds to usage of coping by male teachers.Teachers of the basic school more often use self-controlling coping strategies than secondary school teachers (U=9,15; p<0,05).Secondary school teachers more often use seeking social support coping strategy than gymnasium teachers (U=9,6; p<0,05).Besides, secondary school male teachers signifi cantly more rarely use accepting responsibility (U=5,5; p<0,001) and planful problem solving (U= 5,6; p<0,001) coping strategies than gymnasium teachers.Thus, differentiation of employed stress coping strategies is more signifi cant among male teachers than among female teachers.It could be assumed that more frequent or rarer usage of stress coping strategies also refl ects specifi c stressors, which depend on the type of school.Teachers of the basic school must put more efforts than teachers of other schools involving learners into the learning process.Meanwhile gymnasium teachers encounter different stressful problems in their work, the solution of which requires other mechanisms of coping.In any case it should be noted that as to this sample, essential differences are related to the so-called positive coping strategies.
Teachers may have to experience stressogenic situations, which depend not only on the type of school but also on the type of the delivered subject.Depending on the delivered 58 subject, classes are bigger or smaller, teachers and pupils have different motivation, which may be promoted by the teacher using energy and efforts.The majority of teachers of this sample are language teachers and teachers of art and technologies.The minority are representatives of exact sciences.In male teachers' group no essential difference between frequency of coping and type of delivered subject was identifi ed.Meanwhile the biggest number of differences in female teachers' group was identifi ed comparing stress coping by exact sciences teachers and art and technologies teachers.Representatives of exact sciences signifi cantly more often than art and technologies teachers use distancing (U=47,5; p<0,001), escaping-avoidance (U= 100; p<0,05), confrontation (U=93,1; p<0,01).The latter coping strategy is used by representatives of exact sciences more often compared with natural sciences female teachers (U=32,1; p<0,05).Language teachers signifi cantly more often than art and technologies teachers use planful problem solving (U=4,37; p<0, 05) and distancing (U=3,47; p<0,001).The latter coping strategy is also more often used by natural sciences teachers than art and technologies teachers (U=118,2; p<0, 05).Thus, most often differences occur comparing stress coping strategies used by art and technologies teachers with representatives of other subjects.They use distancing, escapingavoiding, confrontation, planful problem solving more rarely than other teachers.It could be that teachers choose the delivered subject according to their relation with the environment, way of thinking, personality traits.Therefore, it is likely that there are links between the employed coping strategy and individual peculiarities, which could be the fi eld of further researches.
Thus, it could be assumed that the analysis of stress coping strategies with regard to sex, age, type of school and delivered subject provides useful information which could be used counselling teachers on health, welfare and adjustment issues.However, the data of this research describe only the representatives of this sample that is why conclusions and identifi ed regularities cannot be generalised for all teachers.Research results help to foresee fi elds of further researches.It would be relevant to compare peculiarities of stress coping among representatives of various professions, relating these researches to professional deformation.Besides, it is important to empirically and theoretically research effectiveness of coping strategies depending on the situation in which they are applied, not distributing ways of coping into positive and negative (Laranjeira, 2011).

Conclusions
1. Teachers of this sample most often cope with the stressful situation using planful problem solving, accepting responsibility and slightly more rarely using seeking social support.The respondents of this group use escape-avoidance and conformation most rarely.
2. Coping strategies are interrelated by different intensity and reliability.It was identifi ed that seeking social support and distancing are related to all coping strategies and that positive reappraisal and confrontation correlate with the least number of coping strategies.It can be assumed that usage of certain ways of coping activates certain other ways of coping.
3. Female teachers use all stress coping strategies more often than male teachers.Coping strategies used in every sex group only partially coincide and correspond to general sample tendencies.The essential difference was established with regard to signifi cance of using distancing strategy.In male teachers' group distancing falls among fi rst three used strategies, meanwhile in female teachers' group this coping is among the most rarely used strategies in the whole structure of coping strategies.
4. Senior age female teachers more rarely use confrontation and distancing strategies but they use positive reappraisal and planful problem solving more often than younger age female teachers.Female teachers with more years of teaching experience more rarely use confrontation and more often positive reappraisal coping strategies.In men's group no links between stress coping and age were recorded but it was found out that alongside with more years of teaching experience male teachers seek social support and assistance more rarely.
5. A bigger differentiation in male teachers' group according to frequency of used stress coping strategies and the type of school was identifi ed.Men working in the basic school more often use self-controlling than secondary school male teachers.Secondary school male teachers more often use seeking social support than gymnasium teachers and they use accepting responsibility and planful problem solving strategies more rarely than the latter.Female teachers of basic schools signifi cantly more often use self-controlling and accepting responsibility strategies than teachers of secondary schools.
6.In the male teachers' group no essential difference between frequency of stress coping and the type of subject was identifi ed.Meanwhile in female teachers' group most differences were identifi ed comparing coping strategies used by exact sciences teachers and art and technologies teachers.Art and technologies teachers more rarely than teachers of other subjects use distancing, escaping-avoiding, confrontation, planful problem solving.
7. Considering research results, teachers would fi nd it useful to familiarise themselves with as many various stress coping strategies as possible.

Table 1 .
Coping Scales Descriptives and Comparison by Gender