The counsellor's role in primary school is very diverse, often also conflicting and ambiguous. Depending on the school's organizational structure it is often also non-autonomous and subordinate to the administrative needs of the school. The workload, working conditions, and communication with other school subsystems impact the stress levels that counsellors perceive.
This work represents the counsellor's involvement in life and work of the primary school and complexity of his work. Further, I define stress, its symptoms and consequences, and describe more and less functional strategies of coping with stressful situations. With counsellor's work stress, I mainly focus on professional and organizational sources of stress.
In the empirical part, I determine the level of the perceived stress among primary school counsellors from all regions of Slovenia, the correlation between the level of perceived stress and professional and organizational sources of stress, as well as the strategies used by the school counsellors when confronting stressful circumstances. Furthermore, I explore the perceived stress regarding some demographic indicators and selected individual aspects.
The study included 170 counsellors (97.1% of females) from all Slovene regions. The results showed, that 74.1% of the counsellors participating in the study experience their work position as stressful. Among professional and organizational sources of stress, excessive amounts of administrative work, time pressure, and overload with various roles, role conflicts and hardship of the work cases are the most prominent.
Among coping strategies counsellors most frequently use active confrontation with stressful situations.
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