EDUCATORS' RESPONSE TO STRESS: TOWARDS A COPING TAXONOMY

Popular writers and academic researchers have added volumes of literature in the past decades to the study of occupational stress. Most data based studies have investigated the sources of stress while few have addressed how educators cope with their job pressures. Current research on coping provides a wide‐ranging assemblage of fragmented coping techniques or categories of coping that have been theorized but not tested. This study is advanced as a means of overcoming some of the previous shortcomings by: (1) identifying specific coping techniques helpful to educators in handling the tensions of their jobs; (2) clustering the reported techniques into interpretable coping categories; (3) assessing the number and frequencies of coping techniques used by educators; and (4) identifying similarities and differences in coping responses. The results of this study suggest a possible coping taxonomy from which educators could seek stress reduction through a balance of seven coping categories.