ct the study at their schools. (If any principal refuses participation in the study, another school will be randomly selected).
The ten principals agreeing to have their teachers participate in the study will be asked to distribute the instrumentation packets to all teachers at their school and to ask teachers to return the completed instruments to the principal's office. The researcher will collect completed instruments from the offices of the various principals.
Once all completed instrument packets have been returned to the researcher, they will be sorted by school and numbered. A random numbers table will then be used to select 20 teachers from each school; this will result in a total sample size of 200 teachers, 100 of which will be elementary school teachers and 100 of which will be middle school teachers.
It can be noted here that the sample size must be large (at least 200). This is because it is necessary to make sure that there are sufficient numbers of teachers (at least 12) in all grade levels and in all of the demographic categories being assessed. Otherwise, there will be too little data in each category to make analyses meaningful.
Three test instruments will be used in the proposed research. These are the: (1) the Occupational Stress Inventory which is a questionnaire that is part of the Measures of Occupational Stress, Strain and Coping questionnaire (Osipow & Spokane, 1981); this questionnaire will be used to measure subjects' levels of occupational stress; (2) Teacher Source of Stress Inventory (Wheeler, 1995); used to measure the extent to which teachers view themselves as stressed by over 30 different job related sources including such factors as public perception and support of education; school location, and quality of administration; and (3) the Maslach Burnout Inventory (Maslach & Jackson, 1984) used to measure subjects' general level of burnout and their feelings of depersonalization. Each...