Review of teachers’ mental health research in China since 1994

Abstract

To summarize the widely dispersed literature concerning Chinese teachers’ mental status, the present paper conducted a quantitative research synthesis with a focus on the current situation and development in teachers’ mental disorders. On one hand, the results demonstrated that many critical problems existed in the exploration of this issue, such as the primary application of one uniform research type (i.e., theoretical discussion) and single-scale method (i.e., SCL-90); on the other, the comparison analysis showed that college teachers obtained significantly higher pathological prevalence than the other two (i.e., kindergarteners and teachers of middle or primary schools). And such negative prevalence has increased over the years and became sharper after 2000. Additionally, mental disorders seem more severe in country teachers (relative to those working in town), teachers aged above 40 (relative to those younger), and female teachers (relative to males). It is suggested that urgent attention should be paid to further improve the research level by highlighting the methodological consideration, especially focusing on the in-depth survey investigation, refined experimental study, as well as high-caliber qualitative research, and thus clarify the mechanism of teachers’ psychological disorders.

Keywords

teacher / mental health / mental health research / meta-analysis