The relationship between procrastination and stress in the life of the high school teacher

Abstract

The aim of this study was to determine whether there is a relationship between procrastination and stress in a group of high school teachers. Research shows that teaching is one of the most stressful jobs. The researcher decided to examine whether procrastination could be blamed for the stress teachers experience. Procrastination was discussed with regard to its history, how it is defined, various theories of procrastination, a typical cycle that procrastinators follow and also the reasons why people tend to procrastinate. Stress and most importantly work-related stress and the teaching environment was investigated. The research group consisted of 70 teachers, 61 (87 %) female and 9 (13 %) male. The majority of the group was in the age group 21 – 29 years (43 %). Tuckman’s procrastination scale was administered to determine the teachers’ tendency to procrastinate and “The Experience of Work and Life Circumstances Questionnaire” (WLQ), Van der Walt, H.S.&van Zyl, E.S. (1991) was used to determine teachers’ stress levels. The notion that increased levels of procrastination would result in increased levels of stress was assessed and clearly indicated that some measure of correlation between procrastination and stress does exist. Not surprisingly, the correlation tended to be higher for respondents with a high tendency to procrastinate and conversely proved to be weak for respondents with a low tendency to procrastinate. This led to the conclusion that stress experienced by respondents with low to moderate levels of procrastination was not necessarily entirely related to their tendency to procrastinate. However, it seems reasonable to expect the stress experienced by respondents to increase to some degree if their tendency to procrastinate increased. An important fact to remember, however, is that correlation does not necessarily mean causation. Two variables may be related to each other, but this does not mean that one variable causes the other; they are merely indicative of each other.