Determining the Reasons of Technostress Experienced by Teachers: A Qualitative Study

Abstract

In recent years, especially means of information and communication technologies are intensively tried to be integrated into education period in educational fields. In this period, leadership and teachers who shape the ways to use this technology play an important role. Therefore, teachers are expected to use an intensive amount of technology following the technological investments in education fields required by the ministry in recent years. However, this expectation also brings some negative issues into the agenda. One of them is the stress caused by technology, namely; technostress. Technostress is defined as the price of technology use. The purpose of this study is to determine the reasons leading to technostress experienced by teachers, who are the addressee of an intensive use of technology as a result of an integration process to which they are subjected in this study. For this purpose, qualitative data were collected from 64 teachers, who benefit from technology intensively and themes were prepared using 117 different opinions after the content analysis. According to this, there are five main reasons indicating technostress experienced by teachers: individual problems, technical problems, education oriented problems, health problems and time problem. It was also seen in the study that the distribution of reasons leading to technostress experienced by teachers also differs in terms of gender.