The College And University Young Teacher Job Stress Scale

Objective: The job stress of college and university teachers is related not only with their health and job performance, but also with the whole higher education. The job stress of college and university teachers has some same parts with other occupations. On the other hand, it has its own characteristics. Corresponding study should base on current historic and cultural background. Therefore, it is very important to develop a job stress scale for using in college and university teachers. This study aims at: (1) explore the intra-structure of job stress of college and university teachers; (2) develop a new Job Stress Scale for using in college and university young teachers of Shijiazhuang; (3) examine the reliability and validity of the scale.Methods: Taking 491 college and university young teachers from six representative college and universities of Shijiazhuang. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analytic approaches were used to develop and evaluate the intra-structure of the scale. The reliability analysis included Cronbach's α and split-half reliability. The validity analysis included content,construct and criterion-related validity.Results:(1)Using item analysis and exploratory factor analysis,34 items are included in the scale.(2)Exploratory principal component analysis of the items identifies that the scale had six factors, explaining 60.72% of the total variance. Six factors are labeled as following: Human relationships, Occupational development, Job load, Family life, Construction and organization and Self expectancy.(3) Internal consistency analysis showed that the Cronbach's α coefficient,split-half coefficients ranged from 0.53 to 0.76 and 0.52 to 0.79 respectively for each factor, and were 0.80 and 0.80 respectively for the total scale.(4)Inter-scale correlations studies showed that the correlations between items and total scores ranged from 0.23 to 0.87,the correlations among six factors ranged form 0.22 to 0.84,the correlations between each factors and total scores ranged from 0.42 to 0.71. All correlations were significant. (5)Confirmatory factor analysis were conducted to assess the measurement of factor structure of the scale. The results supported six- factor model of the scale.Conclusions:(1) The study finished developing the structure of college and university young teacher job stress scale, and confirmatory factor analysis studies showed the structure of the scale is pretty reasonable.(2)Psychometic properties analysis showed that the scale achieved good to excellent levels of internal consistency , content, construct, and criterion-related validity.