Trauma and Stress in the Principal's Office: Systematic Inquiry as Coping

Abstract

The study of school leaders’ feelings during and about their work suffers from inadequate academic definitions about the depth, character, and legitimacy of those feelings, as well as from limitations on the means of capturing and recording those feelings. This study pushes the definitions of administrators’ stress into the areas of traumatic stress and offers autobiography as a systematic means of investigating and legitimating school leaders’ feelings about their work. Four vignettes drawn from autobiographical inquiry demonstrate the authenticity of this method and the legitimacy of school leaders’ experiences of traumatic stress in their work.