Coping strategies for marital stress as reported by lecturers of Adeyemi College of Education, Ondo, Nigeria

Abstract

Stressful situations which are termed hassles of life can be debilitating and are abound in our daily living especially as married people. Consequently, one needs to employ coping strategies to the situations. The study investigated coping strategies for marital stress as reported by lecturers of a college of education. Lecturers were stratified into different strata of schools in the college i.e School of Education, Science, Arts and Social Sciences, Vocational Technology and Languages, after which a simple random sampling technique was used to select 20 respondents from each school consisting of 44 male and 56 female lecturers making a total of 100 lecturers who participated in the study. The “Coping Strategies for Marital Stress Questionnaire” (CSMSQ) was administered to the responents to collect relavant data. The t-test and Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) statistics were used to test four generated null hypoyheses at 0.05 alpha level of siginficance. Where the result of ANOVA showed a significant difference, Duncan Multiple Range  Test (DMRT) Statistics was used as a post-hoc test to determine the group(s) that led to the significant differences. The major findings showed that the most used coping strategy by the respondents is “overlooking my spouse’s mistakes” with a mean score of 3.36 and ranked 1st while the least used coping strategy is “taking humour as a way out” with a mean score of 2.91 and ranked 15th. The findings equally showed that there was no significant difference in the report of  the lecturers  based on gender while significat differences existed based on age, educational qualification and number of children. Based on the findings, recommendations were made for implementation as follows: .i) Professional counsellors should intensify efforts to set up clinics where people can come for counselling on how to cope with stressful situations;  ii) The government at all levels ought to establish counselling centres in hospitals where people can come for counselling on stressful related matters especially how to cope with stress; and iii) Since overlooking my spouse’s mistakes has been identified as the most used coping strategy by the respondents, married people should endeavour to overlook their spouse’s mistakes so as to avoid stressful situations as much as possible. 

 Key Words: Coping, strategies, marital, stress, and lecturers