Gates, Gordon S. (Ed). (2007). Emerging Thought and Research on Student, Teacher, and Administrator Stress and Coping. Reviewed by Craig L. Esposito, University of Connecticut

Gates, Gordon S. (Ed). (2007). Emerging Thought and Research on Student, Teacher, and Administrator Stress and Coping. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing Pp. x + 246         ISBN 978-1-59311-719-1 Reviewed by Craig L. Esposito University of Connecticut September 3, 2008 The origins of coping research can be found in the original research and theories on individuals’ unconscious defensive mechanisms in response to stress. Since then, coping research has shifted to observing and measuring the intentional and conscious adaptation efforts individuals employ to deal with the stress in their lives. “Stress and coping--how individual efforts to manage distressing problems and emotions affect the physical and psychological outcomes of stress-- have been the focus of a prodigious amount of research over the past two decades” (Sommerfield & McCrae, 2000, p. 620). While stress and coping remains an active, vibrant, productive research area-- enter “Stress and Coping” into Google Scholar and you will get over 28,000 results—the literature on stress and coping and how it relates to the field of education is not that extensive. To address this lacuna, editors Gordon S. Gates, Maryann Wolverton, Walter H. Gmelch, and Christine Schwarzer have introduced a series of edited volumes to bring together stress and coping research explicitly focused on education, and to explore the boundaries of coping research and knowledge in the context of teaching and learning. Emerging Thought and Research on Student, Teacher, and Administrator Stress and Coping, edited by Gordon Gates is the fifth book in this series. The volume’s eleven chapters, representing the work of twenty-three different authors, cover four related but distinct areas: student stress and coping; teacher stress; administrator stress; and new directions for research in education stress and coping. The chapters provide a very useful introduction to, and overview of, stress and coping literature and emerging research issues as they relate to education. At the same time, because the volume covers such a very broad topic, the different chapters represent an eclectic presentation of stress and coping issues, research methods, and settings from around the world; Australia, Holland, Italy, Turkey and the United States. The breadth of the coverage does come at the expense of depth of coverage and underlying unity of the book as a whole. As the title indicates, the volume advances innovative and preliminary research ideas suitable for further investigation in the field of stress and coping in education. In Part I, the chapters suggest possible ways to deal with different types of student stress: a service delivery intervention model for certain types of school absenteeism; a fallback theory to predict when students will revert from productive problem focused coping to less productive emotion focused coping; a program to pro-actively train at-risk students in how to cope with their stress; and yoga as a method for reducing anxiety in students. Part II deals with assessing and identifying teacher stressors, and the chapters examine student behavior, learning disabilities, the gap between classroom resources and demands, and familial and cultural expectations as causes of teacher stress. In Part III, the chapters examine the stress that administrators experience due to limitations in resources or their interpersonal skills, and professional identity issues. The book concludes with chapters on writing as a coping method to make meaning and on the need for a new mixed methods approach in the study of stress and coping. The book mirrors, to a large extent, the state of coping research in general, for both better and worse. Coping research implicitly carries with it the expectation of results that would have immediate clinical or practical applications that may help individuals to cope. Despite those expectations, stress and coping research has been slow to generate practical or clinical approaches, or to discover approaches that actually work. In a similar vein, many of the chapters in this volume propose possible coping interventions for stress or ways to assess stress, but, as in the broader coping literature, uncover little or weak evidence that these approaches actually work, although they do suggest future directions of inquiry for research. One of the ongoing concerns about coping research in general is that it neglects the significant roles that unconscious factors and innate personality traits play in determining how people cope with stressful events. Here, too, this volume has little to say about these topics or their relationship with coping. Coping research as a whole has also struggled with the research methodologies used to investigate coping, and this book devotes the entire last chapter to this issue. Coping researchers often state that since coping is an ongoing, dynamic, internal process, it is perhaps is best captured longitudinally rather than cross-sectionally, and with mixed methods. The final chapter on future research directions proposes a new typology of research mixed method typologies, and encourages the greater use of mixed methods in stress and coping research. This book departs somewhat from current coping research in that the authors reflect almost exclusively the Lazarus and Folkman transactional model (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984), and do very little with more recent extensions of these coping models, such as positive outcomes of stress, stress related growth (Park, Cohen, & Murch, 1996), meaning making (Park, 1997), meaning-based coping (Folkman & Moskowitz, 2000), or benefit finding (Tennen & Affleck,1999). In the one chapter where reflexive writing is examined as a means of sense-making, no mention is made of the significant work done by Pennebaker (cf. Pennebaker & Chung, 2007) in this area. One peculiar aspect of educational stress and coping which is not addressed in this volume, or very much in the general literature either, is the great extent to which policy creates stress--and consequently coping—in the educational system. Perhaps this is fertile ground for another volume in this series. References Folkman, S., & Moskowitz, J. T. (2000). Positive affect and the other side of coping. American Psychologist, 55, 647-654. Lazarus, R. S., & Folkman, S. (1984). Stress, Appraisal and Coping. New York: Springer. Sommerfield, M. R., & McCrae, R. R., (2000). Stress and coping research: Methodological challenges, theoretical advances, and clinical applications. American Psychologist, 55, 620-625. Park, C. L., Cohen, L. H., & Murch, R. L. (1996). Assessment and prediction of stress-related growth. Journal of Personality, 64, 71-105. Park, C. L., & Folkman, S. (1997). Meaning in the context of stress and coping. Review of General Psychology, 12, 115-144. Pennebaker, J. W., & Chung, C. K. (2007). Expressive Writing, Emotional Upheavals, and Health. Foundations of Health Psychology (pp. 263-284). Friedman, H. S.; Silver, R. C. (eds.), New York: Oxford University Press. Tennen, H., & Affleck, G. (1999). Finding benefits in adversity. In C. R. Snyder (Ed.). Coping: The psychology of what works (pp. 279-304). New York: Oxford University Press. About the Reviewer Craig L. Esposito is a Ph.D. student in Educational Policy and Leadership at the University of Connecticut, Neag School of Education. His interests include school finance, school choice, and higher education funding.