Teacher Resilience ESRC Seminar Series Seminar 2

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Teacher ResilienceESRC Seminar SeriesSeminar 2

• Teacher Resilience The Perspective from
  Occupational Health Psychology
• Professor Amanda Griffiths
• Professor Tom Cox
• Oxford 16th June 2010

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Outline

• What is occupational health psychology?
• What is resilience?
• Have we confidence in how to measure it?
  Challenges to the development of concepts
• Is the evidence base secure enough to justify
  intervention?
• Are our research methods good enough to
  evaluate interventions?

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Occupational Health Psychology

• Using the principles of applied psychology to the
  study of occupational health well-being
• Individual issues health behaviour, attitudes,
  personality, health, well-being, illness,
  treatment, rehabilitation
• Systems issues training, selection, induction,
  appraisal, work design, management styles,
  organisational culture

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Resilience - Definition

• Without an agreed precise definition of any
  concept we cannot
• measure it reliably
• study it scientifically
• establish an adequate evidence base to justify
  interventions
• evaluate those interventions
• In the case of resilience, distinguish it from
  other similar concepts
• stress inoculation, stress resistance, hardiness,
  coping strategies, burnout

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Methodologies

• Preferred methods in OHP include both qualitative
  quantitative
• Historical emphasis in Psychology on Natural
  Science Paradigm
• And hence, on quantitative methods
• Tension between needs of researchers and
  practitioners re good enough evidence to
  justify publication or intervention

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Measuring Concepts Scientism?

• The traditional research paradigmhas not
  worked very well.It has produced very reliable
  results about very unimportant things.In that
  process, we have lost touch with some of the
  important phenomena that go on in organisations,
  or have ignored them simply because they were too
  difficult to study by the traditional methods
  available
• Edgar
  Schein (1991)

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Outcome v Process Evaluation in Applied Psychology

• Traditional research focusses on outcomes
  (measures of concepts)
• Need to examine process issues
• Need to examine reasons for no change
• Intentional unintentional processes
• was the analysis of original problem wrong?
• was the design of intervention inappropriate?
• how was intervention implemented?
• did it reach the intended number of people?
• what were the barriers to compliance?
• what were the views of key stakeholders?
• Griffiths,
  1999

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Next Steps

• Move on from conceptual, descriptive,
  cross-sectional research to interventions
• Interventions in applied settings are challenging
  to design, implement evaluate
• Evaluate process (what really happened?) and
  outcome (what changed? how? why?)
• Use qualitative (what was it like?) and
  quantitative (how much of it was there?)
  approaches
• Dependent on agreed definition

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amanda.griffiths_at_nottingham.ac.ukiwho/nottingha
m.ac.uk