Factors of stress among department chairpersons at private baccalaureate institutions: A national study

The purposes of this study were to (a) investigate the stress experienced by department chairs in private undergraduate institutions and (b) through use of an antecedent study in doctoral-granting and research universities, to compare stressors identified by department chairs of undergraduate and graduate institutions. This study, grounded in the dual framework of role theory and stress, used a nationally-distributed mail survey. The randomly selected sample of 390 department chairpersons was stratified by Carnegie Classification and equal sample sizes were designed for three Biglan classifications: Hard/Pure, Soft/Pure, and Soft/Applied. Very few private undergraduate institutions were found to have departments fitting the Hard/Applied criteria. A principal components factor analysis with varimax rotation was performed on 41 stress items. Six factors of stress emerged from the exploratory factor analysis; these factors accounted for 49.6% of the variance. The factor with the theme of time and time constraints accounted for over 25% of the variance. Standardized Z-scores for the six stress factors which emerged from the factor analysis were subjected to several statistical procedures. Primary statistical analysis of the data was accomplished through one-way ANOVA procedures. Post-hoc testing with Tukey\u27s HSD identified significant pair-wise differences for those independent variables with three or more groups (e.g., institution size, departmental quality, and length of service). ANOVA (two-factor) tests were used in a post-hoc manner to test for interaction among potentially confounded independent variables. Pearson product-moment correlations were used to identify significant associations between independent and dependent variables. The standardized Z-scores for the stress factors varied on institutional size, method of search and appointment, perceived quality of institution and department, role conflict and ambiguity, length of service as chairperson, role perception, age, gender, and family circumstance. Variables on which stress did not vary included academic discipline, department size, and racioethnicity. Role conflict showed a significant and positive correlation with five of the six stress factors