Teachers' resilience: conceived, perceived or lived-in

[Extract] Schools in Western countries are places where work related conditions lead to teacher disaffection and attrition. To mitigate this employers and scholars advocate fostering teacher resilience. This chapter presents a critical examination of teacher resilience. Originally conceived as a personal trait, later research showed human resilience is an attribute that can be developed. Resilience is one’s ability to manage stressors and maintain adaptive functioning across all domains of life. Latterly, scholars investigated resilience in teachers, mainly through qualitative or quantitative self-report studies. This research constitutes perceived teacher resilience, because as formulated, teacher resilience is conceptually flawed, limited in scope, based on teachers’ functioning within their professional lives. We do not know what constitutes long serving teachers’ actual, lived-in resilience: what enables teachers to maintain their wellbeing and effectiveness in the classroom, reflecting human resilience as originally conceived. For an accurate profile of teacher resilience we must study those still teaching, and teachers who have exited the profession to determine why they left. Perhaps exiting the profession signals a resilient person who does accept working conditions that do not support wellbeing or teaching effectiveness. Perhaps ‘teacher resilience’ is inaccurately used in the context of teacher attrition and disaffection

Racism as a determinant of health: a systematic review and meta-analysis

Despite a growing body of epidemiological evidence in recent years documenting the health impacts of racism, the cumulative evidence base has yet to be synthesized in a comprehensive meta-analysis focused specifically on racism as a determinant of health. This meta-analysis reviewed the literature focusing on the relationship between reported racism and mental and physical health outcomes. Data from 293 studies reported in 333 articles published between 1983 and 2013, and conducted predominately in the U.S., were analysed using random effects models and mean weighted effect sizes. Racism was associated with poorer mental health (negative mental health: r = -.23, 95% CI [-.24,-.21], k = 227; positive mental health: r = -.13, 95% CI [-.16,-.10], k = 113), including depression, anxiety, psychological stress and various other outcomes. Racism was also associated with poorer general health (r = -.13 (95% CI [-.18,-.09], k = 30), and poorer physical health (r = -.09, 95% CI [-.12,-.06], k = 50). Moderation effects were found for some outcomes with regard to study and exposure characteristics. Effect sizes of racism on mental health were stronger in cross-sectional compared with longitudinal data and in non-representative samples compared with representative samples. Age, sex, birthplace and education level did not moderate the effects of racism on health. Ethnicity significantly moderated the effect of racism on negative mental health and physical health: the association between racism and negative mental health was significantly stronger for Asian American and Latino(a) American participants compared with African American participants, and the association between racism and physical health was significantly stronger for Latino(a) American participants compared with African American participants.<br /

Analysis of teens’ chronic stress on micro-blog

Statistics show that more and more teenagers today are under the stress in all areas of their lives from school to friend, work, and family, and they are not always able to use healthy methods to cope with. Long-term stress without proper guidance will lead to a series of potential problems including physical and mental disorders, and even suicide due to teens’ shortage of psychological endurance and controllability. Therefore, it is necessary and important to sense teens’ long-term stress and help them release the stress properly before the stress starts to cause illness. In this paper, we present a micro-blog based method to recognize teens’ chronic stress by aggregating stress detected from micro-blog. In particular, we analyze the characteristics of teens’ chronic stress, and identify five types of chronic stress level change patterns. We evaluate the framework through a user study at a high school where the 48 participants are aged 16–17. The result provides the evidence that sensing teens’ chronic stress is feasible through the open micro-blog, and the identified stress level change patterns allow us to find useful regulations of teens’ stress transition and to give sensible interpretations

Race, racism and health: disparities, mechanisms, and interventions

Abstract available at publisher's website

Living with a body separate from the self. the experience of the body in chronic benign low back pain: an interpretative phenomenological analysis

This paper presents an in‐depth, idiographic study exploring the personal experience of chronic benign low back pain in relation to the participant's body and sense of self. Semi‐structured interviews were conducted with patients and the resultant transcripts subjected to interpretative phenomenological analysis. One theme is presented in detail: ‘Living with a body separate from the self’, whereby when out of pain the body has little salience to the self yet when in pain it is consciously excluded from the self. The complex and paradoxical relationship between the body, chronic pain and the self is explored and evidence is provided to argue that the embodied unpleasantness of chronic pain involves an assault upon and a defence of a preferred or desirable self. The results are considered in relation to relevant themes in the extant literature