Dataset for the adapted COVID stress scales (ACSS) including teaching anxiety and preparedness, and resilience of academic professionals in Mexico

Introduction

In early 2020, the Mexican Ministry of Health issued a series of guidelines to prevent and reduce the risk of infection with COVID-19, in which there was a directive to suspend all in-person school activities, moving nearly two million academic professionals and over 30 million students from across México, from the traditional classroom setting to the virtual classroom, in order to reduce the spread of the disease.¹ However, this placed the educational system under a significant amount of pressure and stress, needing to migrate to a digital teaching model, and adapt to diverse technological tools and develop computational skills. As expected, this move brought many challenges, particularly to academic professionals as they had to endure both the stress derived from the COVID-19 disease itself and the technological challenges brought by the development of the academic material, to continue immersing the students to obtain the desired academic experience.^2,3 Furthermore, some teaching professionals required going to a physical location at least part-time, which implied the continuous use of protective personal equipment (PPE), and the combination of preparing material at a distance and in-person.^4,5 Hence, this resulted in fear of COVID-19 infection, and emotional and physical fatigue. Stress overload can trigger the development of mild to severe psychiatric disorders such as depression, anxiety, burnout syndrome and sleeping disorders, putting the mental health of teaching professionals at risk.^6,7 Fortunately, resilience is a dynamic adaptative process supporting a healthy psychological state developed by many academic professionals under these conditions.⁸

Different mental health scales have been used to assess and evaluate diverse psychological conditions. In the present study, we evaluated three areas: teaching anxiety and preparedness, resilience and overall stress, by applying a modified version of the adapted COVID-Stress Scales (ACSS). The data presented in the database is important, as this is one of the first integrative evaluation on stress, anxiety and resilience in México during the COVID-19 pandemic and can be used to further study the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in mental health.

Methods

Originally, we used the ACSS to understate stress in healthcare professionals.^5,9 Our current study continues the application of the ACSS, but now for academic professionals, as they faced challenges in bringing education to the virtual classroom. Briefly, to collect the data, we developed the questionnaire, as described in our earlier work, which was further distributed both by directed email and online using social media platforms.⁸

Results from the questionnaire were (as described in our previous work) classified according to their accumulated sums.^5,9 As stated earlier, several modifications were done, such as the inclusion of “teaching anxiety and preparedness”, and “resilience” sections. Contamination, Social Economical, and the fear of being an asymptomatic patient, all had additions to the number of questions. Results from all of our sections were classified as follows: section with two questions, responses including absent = 0-2, mild = 3-4, moderate = 5-6, severe = 7-8. Section with four questions: absent = 0-4, mild = 5-8, moderate = 9-12, severe = 13-16. Sections with six questions (original scale): absent = 0-6, mild = 7-12, moderate = 13-18, severe = 19-24. Sections with nine questions: absent = 0-8, mild = 9-17, moderate = 18-26, and severe = 27-36. Finally, the resilience section was categorized as: very low (0-4), low (5-8), normal (9-12), high (13-16), and very high (17-20). Tables 1 and 2 show the classification per section.

The intervals on Tables 1 and 2 were calculated diving the number of categories – 1 by the maximum result (Maximum points, Tables 1 and 2). For most of the sections, we used: absent, mild, moderate, and severe, or for resilience very low, low, normal, high, and very high.

We further calculated correlations between the results using IBM SPSS Statistics for Windows, version 23.0 (IBM Corp., Armonk, NY, USA). Statistical tests included Pearson’s chi-squared (p < 0.05), calculation of degrees of freedom, verisimilitude and linear association. Our work showed that academic professionals through the COVID-19 pandemic became highly resilient, with as over 80% of all professionals scoring from high to very high in resilience; meanwhile for the ACSS, except for the “danger2 category (section 1) in which the majority of participants (> 40%) scored moderate, the rest of the “stress” categories participant majority was in the absent to mild range. Interestingly, most participants scored mild for teaching anxiety and preparedness and absent for the fear of being an asymptomatic patient. These results can be seen in Table 3 of our manuscript.⁸

Consent

Participant consent was taken by electronic form. Before opting to partake in the study, the survey informed the participants about the nature of the study.

Data availability

Zenodo: Dataset of Teaching anxiety, stress and resilience of academic professionals in Mexico, using the adapted COVID-19 stress scales (ACSS), https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6354838¹¹

The project contains the following underlying data.

Data are available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC-BY 4.0).