Finnish primary school teachers’ emotional coping in student-related stressful situations

Abstract

The current study aimed to explore primary schoolteacher’s emotional stress-coping strategy and to examine its possible relationships with stressful situations caused by pupils’ misbehaviours in Finland context. A total of 12 items in four subscales with second-order model was the most appropriate structure to understand teachers’ emotional coping strategy. In the student-related stressful situations, the most relevant emotional coping strategies were religion/mindfulness, social support from family members, and self-blame. In addition, when teachers use self-blame to acknowledge their stressful emotions, they use another emotional strategy simultaneously, and vice versa. Those results showed significance of future studies on understanding more effective emotional strategies for student-related stress and investigating how teachers use several types of emotional coping strategies coincidently.