Stress Sources and Behavioral Addiction Inclinations of Teachers in the Covid-19 Outbreak

Abstract

In the period of COVID-19, which has become the biggest epidemic disease of modern times, measures taken to avoid the spread of the virus, such as house restrictions or prolonged quarantine, cause insurmountable economic burdens at the social level and lead the masses to experience various negative emotional reactions, psychological difficulties and behavioral changes. The aim of this research is to determine stress sources of teachers during the COVID-19 and their behavioral addiction tendencies. For this purpose, 24 teachers from Van province İpekyolu, Tusba and Edremit districts participated in the study. The research was designed with a mixed pattern, and sequential exploratory design was used. First, the qualitative data is collected and analyzed by a semi-structured interview form, and then "Brief Symptom Inventory" was applied to the participants to collect the supportive quantitative data. While content analysis and descriptive analysis were used in the analysis of qualitative data, descriptive statistics were used for analysis of the data collected from the inventory, and t test was used for relationship analysis. In this study, it was found that (1) the biggest stress sources of teachers were restriction of social life and fear of getting infected, (2) they developed smartphone and social media addiction tendencies to cope with this stress, and (3) female teachers developed more depression and anxiety in this process compared to men.