Examining COVID-19 related occupational stress in teachers in Ireland through a qualitative study using a thematic analysis approach

BACKGROUND: The teaching profession was dramatically affected by COVID-19 with school closures and ultimately the move to online learning. COVID-19 brought additional stress to an already demanding profession with the introduction of online teaching, teachers experiencing fear of infection and addit...

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Autores principales: Minihan, Elisha, Begley, Aoife, Martin, Angela, Dunleavy, Michele, Gavin, Blanaid, McNicholas, Fiona
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. 2022
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9230802/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35783225
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijedro.2022.100183
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author Minihan, Elisha
Begley, Aoife
Martin, Angela
Dunleavy, Michele
Gavin, Blanaid
McNicholas, Fiona
author_facet Minihan, Elisha
Begley, Aoife
Martin, Angela
Dunleavy, Michele
Gavin, Blanaid
McNicholas, Fiona
author_sort Minihan, Elisha
collection PubMed
description BACKGROUND: The teaching profession was dramatically affected by COVID-19 with school closures and ultimately the move to online learning. COVID-19 brought additional stress to an already demanding profession with the introduction of online teaching, teachers experiencing fear of infection and additional workloads accompanying the pandemic. AIM: To examine COVID-19 related occupational stress in teachers in Ireland through a qualitative study using a thematic analysis approach. METHOD: This study implemented two recruitment strategies for participants; email invitations to all members of ILSA and INTO, and email invitations with study information to school principals. A study specific questionnaire was devised with three questions offering free text responses. All responses were anonymous and analysed collectively. The Braun and Clarke thematic analysis method was employed to analyse participants’ responses. RESULTS: 224 participants responded to the survey, however not all participants completed all three questions. Initially 98 codes were generated from the data set, and subsequently reduced to 41 final codes. The codes were arranged into three final themes; Overburdened, Abandoned, and Consequences, representing occupational stress in teachers during COVID-19. CONCLUSION: In the form of the three themes identified, participants described issues such as large class sizes, high workload, and out of work hours contact, among others. These issues contributed negatively to participants’ mental health and wellbeing with descriptions of being exhausted, isolated, stressed and experiencing burnout. Ensuring adequate awareness of, and paying attention to, teacher wellbeing is essential, such that optimisation of school environment can occur in light of additional burden associated with COVID-19.
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spelling pubmed-92308022022-06-27 Examining COVID-19 related occupational stress in teachers in Ireland through a qualitative study using a thematic analysis approach Minihan, Elisha Begley, Aoife Martin, Angela Dunleavy, Michele Gavin, Blanaid McNicholas, Fiona Int J Educ Res Open Article BACKGROUND: The teaching profession was dramatically affected by COVID-19 with school closures and ultimately the move to online learning. COVID-19 brought additional stress to an already demanding profession with the introduction of online teaching, teachers experiencing fear of infection and additional workloads accompanying the pandemic. AIM: To examine COVID-19 related occupational stress in teachers in Ireland through a qualitative study using a thematic analysis approach. METHOD: This study implemented two recruitment strategies for participants; email invitations to all members of ILSA and INTO, and email invitations with study information to school principals. A study specific questionnaire was devised with three questions offering free text responses. All responses were anonymous and analysed collectively. The Braun and Clarke thematic analysis method was employed to analyse participants’ responses. RESULTS: 224 participants responded to the survey, however not all participants completed all three questions. Initially 98 codes were generated from the data set, and subsequently reduced to 41 final codes. The codes were arranged into three final themes; Overburdened, Abandoned, and Consequences, representing occupational stress in teachers during COVID-19. CONCLUSION: In the form of the three themes identified, participants described issues such as large class sizes, high workload, and out of work hours contact, among others. These issues contributed negatively to participants’ mental health and wellbeing with descriptions of being exhausted, isolated, stressed and experiencing burnout. Ensuring adequate awareness of, and paying attention to, teacher wellbeing is essential, such that optimisation of school environment can occur in light of additional burden associated with COVID-19. The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. 2022 2022-06-24 /pmc/articles/PMC9230802/ /pubmed/35783225 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijedro.2022.100183 Text en © 2022 The Authors Since January 2020 Elsevier has created a COVID-19 resource centre with free information in English and Mandarin on the novel coronavirus COVID-19. The COVID-19 resource centre is hosted on Elsevier Connect, the company's public news and information website. Elsevier hereby grants permission to make all its COVID-19-related research that is available on the COVID-19 resource centre - including this research content - immediately available in PubMed Central and other publicly funded repositories, such as the WHO COVID database with rights for unrestricted research re-use and analyses in any form or by any means with acknowledgement of the original source. These permissions are granted for free by Elsevier for as long as the COVID-19 resource centre remains active.
spellingShingle Article
Minihan, Elisha
Begley, Aoife
Martin, Angela
Dunleavy, Michele
Gavin, Blanaid
McNicholas, Fiona
Examining COVID-19 related occupational stress in teachers in Ireland through a qualitative study using a thematic analysis approach
title Examining COVID-19 related occupational stress in teachers in Ireland through a qualitative study using a thematic analysis approach
title_full Examining COVID-19 related occupational stress in teachers in Ireland through a qualitative study using a thematic analysis approach
title_fullStr Examining COVID-19 related occupational stress in teachers in Ireland through a qualitative study using a thematic analysis approach
title_full_unstemmed Examining COVID-19 related occupational stress in teachers in Ireland through a qualitative study using a thematic analysis approach
title_short Examining COVID-19 related occupational stress in teachers in Ireland through a qualitative study using a thematic analysis approach
title_sort examining covid-19 related occupational stress in teachers in ireland through a qualitative study using a thematic analysis approach
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9230802/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35783225
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijedro.2022.100183
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