Exploring relations between teacher emotions, coping strategies, and intentions to quit: A longitudinal analysis

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Abstract

Although previous research has indicated that emotions have a substantial impact on teacher well-being, research is lacking concerning the relationships between teachers' emotions, coping strategies, and quitting intentions. This current five-month, two-wave longitudinal study investigated the relations between these variables in a sample of 1086 Canadian teachers (female: 81.3%; Mage = 42). Results from cross-lagged analyses revealed that teachers' trait emotions corresponded with coping strategies and that trait emotions and coping strategies both corresponded with intentions to quit the teaching profession. Mediational latent change analyses further showed that baseline levels of teachers' anxiety corresponded with greater emotion-focused disengagement coping that, in turn, led to stronger intentions to quit the teaching profession. Finally, decreases in teachers' anxiety over time additionally corresponded with decreases in disengagement coping. Limitations and practical implications concerning the importance of providing meaningful support to teachers for reducing anxiety, improving coping, and reducing quitting intentions are discussed.

Section snippets

Theoretical frameworks on teacher emotions

According to Frenzel (2014) and Sutton (2005), teachers' emotions represent a multi-componential construct that encompasses cognitive, physiological, motivational, and expressive components. Therefore, emotional episodes can be characterized by not only their affective sensation (e.g., anxiety), but also by relevant cognitions (e.g., “I am afraid”), physiological changes (e.g., release of hormones), action tendencies (e.g., fight vs. flight), and expressive behaviors (e.g., body movements and

Consequences of teacher emotions

Recent studies on teacher emotions have mainly focused on three most commonly experienced emotions in classroom settings, namely enjoyment, anger, and anxiety (e.g., Frenzel, Goetz, Stephens, & Jacob, 2009; Keller, Frenzel, et al., 2014; Sutton, 2007). Enjoyment is commonly identified as the most common positive emotion (Frenzel, 2014; Frenzel, Goetz, Stephens, & Jacob, 2009; Keller, Chang, et al., 2014) and anxiety and anger are usually argued to be the most common negative emotions (Frenzel,

Coping with emotions: the teaching context

Coping is defined as "constantly changing cognitive and behavioral efforts to manage specific external and internal demands that are appraised as taxing or exceeding the resources of the person" (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984; p. 141). As such, coping is a broad term that encompasses a range of strategies that individuals use to effectively manage their emotions. Moreover, whereas coping and emotion regulation are often used synonymously to refer to strategies to deal with emotional situations, they

Teachers' emotions and coping strategies

Although teachers' emotions and the coping strategies that they use to deal with emotional encounters are both important antecedents of their psychological well-being and behavior, these two concepts have to date remained largely independent of one another. For example, just as the teacher emotion literature rarely examines the role of coping strategies, the teacher coping literature typically does not tend to differentiate between specific (discrete) types of emotions (e.g., anxiety vs.

The current study

The current exploratory short-term longitudinal study aimed to address the research gap concerning the causal relations between teachers' discrete emotions and the coping strategies that they use to deal with emotions. This study also investigated the influences of teachers' trait emotions and coping strategies on their intentions to quit the teaching profession or to leave their current school. Results from the current study thus contribute to existing literature by addressing an important gap

Participants

Participants included 1086 Canadian practicing teachers (female: 81.3%; Caucasian: 94.6%). Time 1 participants reported a mean age of 42 years (SD = 9.13), averaged 15 years (SD = 7.86) of teaching experience, and taught at primary schools (Grades 1–6; 43.6%), secondary schools (Grades 7–12: 44.9%), or across multiple education levels (e.g., primary and secondary: 9.6%). Most teacher participants held either a bachelor's degree (61.4%) or a master's degree (29.3%). Independent sample t-tests

Preliminary analyses

Confirmatory factor analyses (CFA) conducted for each of the scales showed acceptable model fit for each of the scales assessed (emotions: CFI = 0.953, TLI = 0.942, RMSEA = 0.044, SRMR = 0.043; coping strategies: CFI = 0.955, TLI = 0.915, RMSEA = 0.039, SRMR = 0.037; quitting intentions: CFI = 0.963, TLI = 0.941, RMSEA = 0.068, SRMR = 0.046). A comprehensive CFA analysis including all study variables across both time points similarly demonstrated acceptable fit (CFI = 0.937, TLI = 0.924,

Discussion

The current study aimed to study and address an important gap concerning the predictive relations between teachers' coping strategies, trait emotions, and their intentions to quit the teaching profession/leave their current school. We summarize our study findings below based on each of the hypotheses.

Acknowledgements

The study was supported by an Insight Development Grant (Ref.: 767-2013-1099) and a Doctoral Fellowship (Ref.: 767-2016-1604) from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, as well as grants from the Education University of Hong Kong (Ref.: RG 74/2018-2019R; RG 92/2018-2019R).

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