Abstract
Given school counselors’ many responsibilities, the importance of their work and the misunderstanding of their role by others, it is clear that school counselors are vulnerable to harmful levels of stress. Existing stress scales provide insufficient solutions for measuring stress in the school counselor's contemporary role because they are not profession specific, are unidimensional or are outdated. Our purpose was to develop and validate a means of measuring school counselors’ stress. Exploratory factor analysis on a pilot sample (N=72) revealed eight factors: misunderstanding and lack of appreciation for the counselor’s role, violence, lack of cooperation, task prioritization, bureaucracy, work-home conflict, serving as a mediator and dealing with discipline. Confirmatory factor analysis on a larger sample (N=205) yielded a good fit for the eight-factor structure. Participants consistently reported higher levels of stress due to bureaucracy, work-home conflict and dealing with discipline than they did for misunderstanding and lack of appreciation for the counselor’s role, violence and serving as a mediator. These differences strengthen the importance of measuring specific stressors rather than just a unidimensional stress construct. Additionally,qualitative methods were used for richer understanding of school counselors’ perceptions of stress in their work. These findings might suggest additions to school counselors’ training programs, such as non-counseling duties and ways of attenuating conflicts between non-counseling and counseling responsibilities.
Translated title of the contribution | School counselors' stress perceptions |
---|---|
Original language | Hebrew |
Pages (from-to) | 57-81 |
Number of pages | 25 |
Journal | הייעוץ החינוכי |
Volume | כ"ג |
State | Published - 2021 |
IHP publications
- ihp
- Educational counseling
- Job stress
- Burn out (Psychology)
- Questionnaires