Comprehensively understanding K-12 teachers’ occupational health: a convergent mixed-methods exploration of stress and wellbeing

Stress has detrimental impacts on K-12 teachers’ occupational health, yet there is no consensus on how best to define and measure it. As such, the present study implemented quantitative and qualitative methodologies, including a physiological measure of stress, to comprehensively assess and understand teacher stress in one independent school district in the southern United States. Forty-four public school teachers participated by completing self-reported measures of stress and occupational health, providing a hair sample to assess cortisol concentration, and participating in qualitative interviews ( n = 13). Results demonstrated consistency between the self-reported measures of stress and occupational health but not between these measures and hair cortisol concentration. Qualitatively, the self-reported measures of stress were found to be entangled in theoretically meaningful ways with the analyzed themes. Finally, there was preliminary evidence suggesting teachers’ risk for stress was reflected in both the self-report and hair cortisol analyses. Implications for better understanding teacher stress conceptually and through mixed-methods research are discussed.