IMPACT OF STRESS ON AGRICULTURAL SCIENCE TEACHERS IN SECONDARY SCHOOLS IN A NORTH CENTRAL NIGERIAN COMMUNITY

Agricultural Education and Training

The study sought to ascertain impact of stress among agricultural science teachers in secondary schools in a North Central Nigerian Community. Three research questions and one hypothesis guided the study. The study adopted survey research design and was carried out in Okene community of Kogi State, North Central Nigeria. The population of the study was 232 agricultural science teachers in secondary schools in the study area. There was no sampling since the population was manageable. Two instruments were utilized for data collection namely; the adapted 10-item version of Cohen’s Perceived Stress Scale (PSS) and Stress Causes and Consequences Questionnaire (SCCQ). The instruments were validated by five experts who were all lecturers in the Department of Agricultural Education. Cronbach Alpha was used to test the reliability of the two instruments which yielded a reliability coefficient of 0.83 and 0.79 for adapted PSS and SCCQ respectively. Two hundred and thirty two copies of the two instruments were administered by the researcher with the help of three research assistants. Out of the 232 copies of questionnaire distributed, there was an 89% retrieval rate which equated to 207 retrieved copies. Descriptive statistics (percentage, frequencies, mean and standard deviation) as well as analytic statistics using Chi Square for the association between categories were applied and presented with the aid of Tables and graphical representations. The result obtained revealed the following; there were high stress levels among agricultural science teachers as 144 Agricultural science teachers (69.2%) of the total participants reported that they experienced stress fairly often or very often as against only 26 agricultural science teachers (13.3%) who reported to have never experienced stress or almost never experience stress; gender plays a role in level of stress experienced as 78.36% of females fairly often or very often experienced stress as against the 61.83% of males that fairly often or very often experienced stress. It also revealed eight causes as well as eight consequences of stress. Based on the findings, the study recommended among others that; the administrators of secondary schools should organize conferences, seminars and workshops for agricultural science teachers on ways of managing stress so as to reduce the high level of stress among agricultural science teachers; and State and Local Governments should ensure that teachers are well compensated for their jobs and that salaries are paid as at when due to eradicate factors that can cause stress such as low remuneration and delay of salaries

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.