Short-term Dynamic Changes of Teacher Occupational Mental Health: Evidence from Experience-Sampling Methods

Subjects: Psychology >> Educational Psychology submitted time 2024-05-02

Li Xiying Qin Xiaoyi Cao Wanru Guo Qiuyi Zhao Qihui Pi Zhongling

Abstract： Teacher is in a profession with high workload as they have to meet the diverse learning needs of their students. As a results, teacher is more likely to experience huge pressure and stress, compared to those in other occupations. A large number of studies have shown that teacher mental health, including positive and negative mental health, is greatly influenced by students’ behaviors in classroom (e.g., problem behaviors). However, the dynamic mechanism underlying the relationship between student behaviors in classroom and teacher occupational mental health is still unclear. Previous studies have suggested that teacher perception of student behaviors in classroom and their internal working model mediating the influence of student behaviors on teacher mental health./t/nOne limitation of previous studies is that the measure of teacher mental health is not bonding with occupational characteristics. They commonly use more general measure on mental health to indicate teacher mental health. Teachers daily experience student-bonding events (Pi et al., 2022). Consequently, the conclusion in previous studies might not be generalized to teacher occupation. In addition, most previous studies examined teacher mental health based on static rather than dynamic methods./t/nAnother limitation of previous studies is that previous studies examined teacher mental health either from positive or negative perspectives. Some researcher claim that mental health covers two perspectives: positive (e.g., engagement, personal accomplishment, vigor) and negative (e.g., burnout, emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, effort-reward imbalance) mental health. In other words, a teacher shows high level of engagement, accompanied by high level of burnout, and vice versa./t/nTo bridge research gaps, the present study adopted dual factor model of mental health and aimed to examine short-term dynamic changes of teacher occupational mental health by experience-sampling methods. We randomly recruited 134 middle school teachers to report their burnout, engagement, emotional experience, and student behaviors in classroom lasting ten consecutive working days. The results of latent profile analysis (LPA) showed that 19.8% teachers experienced low level of occupational mental health (i.e., high characteristics in emotional exhaustion and depersonalization, and low characteristics in personal accomplishment, vigor, dedication, and absorption), 55.9% experienced medium level, and 24.3% experienced high level (i.e., low characteristics in emotional exhaustion and depersonalization, and high characteristics in vigor, dedication, and absorption). Compared to teachers with medium level of occupational mental health, low level teachers exhibited more negative internal working model and less positive internal working model. Furthermore, teachers with negative internal working model perceived more student negative behaviors in classroom, resulting decreasing their positive emotions and increasing negative emotions. Interestingly, cross-day lagged analysis showed that more negative emotions teachers with low and medium level of occupational mental health experienced, more negative internal working model they adopted the next day. On the contrary, more positive emotions teachers with high level of occupational mental health experienced, less negative internal working model they adopted the next day./t/nThe main findings of the present study have some important implications for improving teacher occupational mental health.

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