The Impact of Teacher’s Job Stress on Life Satisfaction in Vocational Colleges: Literature Review
Keywords:
Job Stress, Teaching Stress, Research Stress, Administrative Pressure, Life Satisfaction, Higher Vocational CollegesAbstract
China has long been known for a highly competitive education system in which teachers usually devote enormous time and energy to their daily work, including teaching, student guidance, and class management (Ye & Zhao, 2019). Teaching has long been considered as a high-stress profession due to the tremendous pressure teachers experience in their careers (Jonsonetal., 2005; Noor and Zanuddin, 2011). For academic staff, stressors include the high pressure to publish and the additional burden placed on their shoulders by managing the balance of tasks and roles (Graca et al., 2020). The situation may be even more severe for Chinese university teachers as they seek to build more world-class universities (Zhu et al., 2018; Zhang et al., 2019). Except for "interpersonal relationships", the average score of stress in all other dimensions (teaching, living burden, academic competition, workload, administrative affairs, and international communication) has exceeded the middle score. Administrative affairs are the most stressful (Min ,2020).
The Blue Book on Mental Health, part of China's National Mental Health Development Report (2021-2022), surveyed 21,876 teachers and found that 20.7 percent felt burned out and another 3.5 percent felt so burned out that they needed to make changes or seek help.
This paper aims to summarize the relationship between teachers' job stress and teachers' life satisfaction from three dimensions: teaching stress, scientific research pressure and administrative pressure. In this literature review, the authors use past research to justify the use of the Job Demands-Resources (JD-R) Model in studies examining teachers' job stress and life satisfaction in vocational colleges.
References
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