Depression level among various categories of college teachers of Punjab: An exploratory study

The present study investigated level of depression among college teachers of Punjab across three employment categories; Regular, Contractual, and Guest faculty. Methodology: Total Nine hundred (N=900) Assistant Professors working at different Government and Govt. Aided Colleges of Punjab were selected by using the random sampling technique. The age of the subjects was ranged between 24-60 years. Further, the subjects were classified on the basis of their nature of appointment i.e. Regular, Contractual and Guest faculty. Tools Used: Personal Assessment Inventory (PAI) Depression scale constructed by Samuel, E. K. and Laughlin, J.E. (1984) was used to collect the required data. Statistical Application: Descriptive Statistics; Mean and Standard Deviation were computed whereas under Inferential statistics, the One Way Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) was applied to find out the significant differences with regard to depression level among Regular, Contractual and Guest faculty. Scheffe’s Post-hoc test was applied to find out the degree and direction of differences, where ‘F’ ratio was found significant. The level of significance was set at 0.05. Findings: Results of One-way Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) exhibited significant differences among all the groups in question. The post-hoc testing revealed that the guest faculty members had shown higher level of depression followed by contractual faculty members and comparatively lower level of depression was demonstrated by the regular faculty members. Conclusion: It was concluded that regular faculty members demonstrated the lower level of depression followed by contractual, whereas, guest faculty exhibited the highest level of depression. Therefore, the present study reveals that employment status plays a crucial role in contributing to the depression among the various categories of faculty members.