Organizational Role Stress and Ways of Coping among Rural and Urban Primary School Teachers

This investigation was aimed at studying the relationship between level of orgamzational role stress and the ways of coping of primary school teachers of rural and urban area. A sample of 240 teachers (120 Male, 120 Female) was selected from govt, schools of rural and urban area of Distt. Bareilly (U.P). Fareek's(1983) Organizational Role Stress Scale was administered to measure the level of teachers' stress and The Ways of Coping Questionnaire (1988) by Lazarus and Folkman was used to find out the ways of coping used by the teachers. Results indicated that there was significant difference between rural and urban teachers for ORS as well as ways of coping. Rural teachers experience more organizational stress in comparison to urban teachers. In addtion they used more problem focused coping like planful problem solving and seeking social support to deal with their stress in comparison to urban teachers. These findings were similar for male as well as female. The findings of the present study revealed, ORS is sigmficantly negatively related to problem focused coping and positively to emotion focused coping. These results were similar for rural and urban but the interesting finding is that among rural teachers more problem focused ways like confronting, planful problem solving, seeking social support were found significantly negatively related to ORS for both male as well as female, while few emotion focused coping like accepting responsibility and positive reappraisal were significantly positively related to organizational role stress, only among female teachers. In urban area both male and female teachers more frequently used both type of coping.