2025, Vol. 12, Issue 6, Part J

School teaching is regarded as one of the most stressful professions worldwide. To maintain schoolteachers' mental health, the factors influencing occupational stress index among schoolteachers must be clarified. The purpose of the study was to compare the mental health and occupational stress index between the teaching staff and non-teaching staff working in the school in Shirpur city. For this the researcher had selected the N=60 staffs working in the CBSE schools which were further divided into two group teaching staff (TS) n=30 and non-teaching staffs (NTS) n=30. The selected staffs were the male with the mean age of 36 +/- 2.1 years and the working experience of more than 10 years. The psychological variables of the study were the mental health and occupational stress index between the teaching and non-teaching staffs. The inventories used for the assessment of the selected psychology variables were the standard questionnaire, the Mental Health Scale (MH) constructed by Dr. D. J. Bhatt and Gita Gida (1992), and the Occupational stress index Scale (OSI) developed by Srivastav and Singh (1981). The t-test was applied to the collected data from the teaching and non-teaching staffs to find out the significant difference between both groups on selected psychology variables, i.e., mental health and occupational stress index.

Results: Teaching staff (M = 71.83, SD = 7.82) and non-teaching staff (M = 70.67, SD = 5.68) did not differ significantly in mental health (t(58) = 0.66, p = .51). Occupational-stress means were also similar (189.00 ± 15.77 vs. 188.50 ± 13.78; t(58) = 0.13, p = .90). Effect sizes (Cohen’s d = 0.17 and 0.03) indicated negligible differences.