Social and psychological indicators of a teacher’s crisis in the interpersonal relations with their students

Abstract

This article reports the results of an empirical research studying how teachers experience a crisis in the interpersonal relations with their students. For the purposes of this research, it is assumed that shifts along the harmony-disharmony scale and changes in the types of one’s interpersonal relations can serve as social and psychological indicators demonstrating whether a teacher is coping with a crisis in their student relations in a constructive or destructive manner. There were 541 study participants in total, including 195 kindergarten teachers, 216 school teachers and 130 higher education teachers. All of them were Russian citizens who were asked to pass our examination by their psychologist. The respondents’ age was 44.7 ± 10.4, their experience working in education was 20.30 ± 12.0 years. The study was conducted at Kurgan city and Kurgan oblast public kindergartens, schools, vocational schools and universities from 2015 to 2019. The following psychological diagnostic tools were used in the study: “Individual’s Experience of a Psychological Crisis,” “Subjective Evaluation of Interpersonal Relations” and “Interpersonal Relations Diagnostics.” The research has shown that teachers with harmonious relations with their students could be described as “mentally healthy with a positive crisis outlook,” while their counterparts with disharmonious relations with their students “experienced the crisis in a destructive manner and had a negative crisis outlook.” It has been found that teachers experiencing a relations crisis commonly demonstrated the submissive-shy, distrustful-sceptical and dependant-submissive types of interpersonal relations. The individual interpersonal behaviour style most prevalent in this group of teachers was the “submission — friendliness” style. The teachers who are not experiencing a relations crisis are commonly characterised by the authoritative-leading and independent-dominating types of interpersonal relations, with the “dominating — friendly” individual interpersonal relations style. The acquired data can be used to design programmes aimed at preventing and overcoming the interpersonal relations crisis in teachers.