Teachers’ coping strategies regarding the pandemic: Connections with fear of COVID-19 and teachers’ mental wellbeing

Abstract

Responses to the COVID-19 pandemic have put the schools and their staff in the frontlines, creating a long list of new stressors for teachers to deal with. Respecting the challenges of pandemic education, a group of researchers conducted a survey on a sample of 817 elementary school teachers with the aim of assessing teachers’ coping strategies regarding the pandemic and their connections to fear of COVID-19 and their mental wellbeing. Data were collected during April and May 2021, through an online questionnaire. Coping strategies were measured with Brief-COPE, consisting of 14 scales, covering a wide range of coping strategies that can be grouped into approach strategies – those that actively work to change the stressor or accept its presence in one’s life and avoidant coping strategies – that tend toward more dysfunctional responses such as denial, distraction, or substance use. Fear of COVID-19 Scale and Warwick-Edinburg Mental Well-being Scale were also used. Research results show that teachers use more actively approach strategies (M = 37.52, SD = 6.01), than avoidant strategies (M = 23.41, SD = 4.75) (t(757) = 64.73, p = .000). Fear of COVID-19 correlates positively with both clusters, but more significantly with avoidance strategies (r = .46, p < .001) than approach strategies (r = .25, p < .001). Teachers’ mental wellbeing correlates mildly positively (r = .14, p < .001) with approach strategies, but correlates moderately negatively with avoidant strategies (r = -.31, p < .001). These results confirm the negative correlations between avoidant strategies and teachers’ mental wellbeing, as well as its stronger connection with the fear of COVID-19, suggesting that teachers’ tend to choose avoidant strategies if they are more negatively influenced by the pandemic.