TY  - JOUR
A1  - Varol, Yasemin Z.
A1  - Weiher, Gerald M.
A1  - Wendsche, Johannes
A1  - Lohmann-Haislah, Andrea
T1  - Difficulties detaching psychologically from work among German teachers: prevalence, risk factors and health outcomes within a cross-sectional and national representative employee survey
T2  - BMC public health
N2  - Background: Teachers often face high job demands that might elicit strong stress responses. This can increase risks of adverse strain outcomes such as mental and physical health impairment. Psychological detachment has been suggested as a recovery experience that counteracts the stressor-strain relationship. However, psychological detachment is often difficult when job demands are high. The aims of this study were, first, to gain information on the prevalence of difficulties detaching from work among German teachers, second, to identify potential person-related/individual (i.e., age, sex), occupational (e.g., tenure, leadership position), and work-related (e.g., overload, cognitive, emotional, and physical demands) risk factors and, third, to examine relationships with mental and physical health impairment and sickness absence.
Methods: A secondary analysis of cross-sectional data from a national and representative survey of German employees was conducted (BIBB/BAuA Employment Survey 2018). For the analyses data from two groups of teachers (primary/secondary school teachers: n = 901, other teachers: n = 641) were used and compared with prevalence estimates of employees from other occupations (n = 16,266).
Results: Primary/secondary school teachers (41.5%) and other teachers (30.3%) reported more difficulties detaching from work than employees from other occupations (21.3%). Emotional demands and deadline/performance pressure were the most severe risk factors in both groups of teachers. In the group of primary/secondary school teachers multitasking demands were further risk factors for difficulties to detach from work whereas support from colleagues reduced risks. In both groups of teachers detachment difficulties can be linked to an increase in psychosomatic and musculoskeletal complaints and, additionally, to a higher risk of sickness absence among primary/secondary school teachers.
Conclusions: Difficulties detaching from work are highly prevalent among German teachers. In order to protect them from related risks of health impairment, interventions are needed which aim at optimizing job demands and contextual resources (i.e., work-directed approaches) or at improving coping strategies (i.e., person-directed approaches).
KW  - Psychological detachment
KW  - Health
KW  - Recovery
KW  - Representative survey
KW  - Sickness absence
KW  - Stress
KW  - Teacher
KW  - Work
Y1  - 2021
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/69554
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-695542
SN  - 1471-2458
N1  - The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.
N1  - The German Federal Institute for Occupational Safety and Health funded the data collection and granted the third and fourth authors’ research activities during this study (Project F2431). Open Access funding enabled and organized by Projekt DEAL
N1  - The dataset (accession no. ZA7574) used for this article is available as a scientific-use-file (SUF) and can be requested at „BIBB – Federal Institute for Vocational Education and Training “(P.O. Box 20 12 64; 53142 Bonn; Germany; fax number: + 49 – (0)228–107 – 2020). Application form can be downloaded from this website: https://www.bibb.de/de/1403.php. The dataset will be available as ftp-download after approved application.
VL  - 21.2021
IS  - art. 2046
SP  - 1
EP  - 15
PB  - BioMed Central
CY  - London
ER  -