ABSTRACT

Purpose:

to investigate public elementary school teachers' perception about the environmental and psychosocial aspects of their work and relating this perception to vocal discomfort symptoms.

Methods:

cross-sectional study encompassing a probabilistic sample comprising public school teachers. The study included 90 individuals (18 men and 72 women) distributed in age groups from 24 to 65 years. The research instrument was a questionnaire composed of 40 questions divided in 5 blocks. Descriptive analysis as well as univariate and multivariate linear regression analyses were carried out to verify the associations between the number of vocal symptoms and the teachers' working conditions.

Results:

approximately one third of the teachers (34.4%) reported eight vocal symptoms (mean=5.6/SD= 2.4). Regarding the working environment features, most teachers mentioned high or unbearable noise as sound competition to voice use: 43.3% of the noise was reported in the classroom, and 41.1% of it was reported in the school. As for the psychosocial aspects of their work, 54.4% of the teachers reported low psychological demand and 55.6% reported low social support. The variable associated with the number of symptoms in the final multivariate model was the noise inside the classroom.

Conclusion:

primary school teachers show high number of vocal discomfort symptoms. The vocal discomfort is significantly associated to the presence of noise within the classroom. The relation between the psychosocial aspects of the work and the voice disorders needs to be investigated, although there was no difference in the number of vocal symptoms found in the current study.

Keywords:
Voice; Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences; Dysphonia; Teacher; Working Conditions