The structural context matters. In Türkiye, teacher assignment in public schools is centrally regulated by the Ministry of National Education, but private school administrators make their own recruitment, interviewing, and hiring decisions. While this autonomy allows institutional flexibility, the researchers argue that it also creates a governance space in which informal criteria can operate alongside formal qualifications, raising the risk of subjective or discriminatory decision-making. Because teachers are the primary channel through which educational policy becomes classroom practice, the selection process is not a marginal administrative formality but a leadership-level decision with direct consequences for institutional performance, school climate, and parental trust.

To capture how private schools publicly express their expectations, the researchers analyzed teacher recruitment advertisements posted between March and April 2022 on Kariyer.net and Yenibiris.com, two of the largest online career platforms in the country. Kariyer.net has operated since 1999, hosts more than 28 million users, and receives roughly one million daily visits, while Yenibiris.com counts over 20 million registered users. After removing duplicates and applying inclusion and exclusion criteria, 648 advertisements remained for thematic content analysis. The postings were examined for recruitment criteria, candidate qualifications, job expectations, and potentially discriminatory or exclusionary language.

The advertisement analysis identified three recurring categories of expectations beyond professional qualifications: working conditions, appearance expectations, and communication and representation expectations. The most frequently identified code was flexible working hours, appearing 18 times, followed by the requirement to be presentable, which appeared 17 times, and proper diction, which appeared 11 times. Although such expressions may not always indicate explicit discrimination, the authors note that they create ambiguity in recruitment criteria and open space for subjective evaluation. The term presentable, in particular, lacks any clear operational definition, meaning it can function as a discretionary mechanism through which implicit biases are normalized under the appearance of institutional compatibility.

The second phase of the study brought these textual patterns into contact with lived experience. Eighteen teachers, twelve women and six men aged 25 to 41, were selected through purposive maximum-variation sampling to reflect diversity in subject area, gender, age, marital status, parental status, and years of experience, which ranged from 2 to 19 years. Semi-structured interviews explored whether participants had experienced discrimination during private school recruitment, on what basis it occurred, how they felt, and how they responded. Data collection continued until thematic saturation was reached, and the interview form was reviewed by two academics and one practicing teacher before pilot testing.

Participants reported perceived discrimination across seven themes: age, marital status, physical appearance, political opinion, gender, favoritism, and lifestyle. Age and marital status were the most frequently reported grounds, followed by lifestyle and political factors. One teacher recalled being offered a very low salary simply because she was a recent graduate, while another was told she looked too young for students to take seriously. Others were asked directly whether they planned to have children, or were told that being unmarried was a plus for the school. One participant with a young baby believed interviewers assumed she would be unable to concentrate fully on the job. Appearance-related comments ranged from criticism of a candidate’s high-pitched voice and short stature to questions about piercings and tattoos, and one teacher was warned that her clothing would need to align with the conservative values of parents.

Political and lifestyle discrimination also surfaced in striking forms. Participants described being evaluated according to a school’s political climate, including remarks about wearing an Atatürk badge, reading books from a particular publishing house, and speculation about religious identity. Some were asked about their daily observance of prayers. Accounts of favoritism centered on regional affiliation and personal referrals, with several participants suspecting that recommendations from acquaintances or a shared hometown with administrators influenced decisions. These perceptions echo earlier Turkish research in which teachers described favoritism as unfair advantage and bias, and international work showing that favoritism emerges when communal ties intersect with merit-based hiring expectations.

The emotional toll was substantial. The most frequently expressed emotion was anger, followed by resentment, helplessness, ambition, and pessimism, with sadness and disappointment also common. One teacher described crying from frustration after an interview despite having a résumé and work ethic above average for her age, while another said she felt helpless because prejudices are not easily broken and she was not even given a chance to prove otherwise. Cognitive responses included self-doubt, alienation, overgeneralization, and the need to defend oneself and the profession. Notably, the most common behavioral response was silence: most teachers reported no reaction, an inability to respond, or politely ending the interview, while a minority voiced explicit dissent or left the interview after stating their discomfort.

The authors interpret these patterns through organizational justice theory and Kanter’s theory of tokenism. The presence of appearance-related, lifestyle-based, and ideologically loaded criteria suggests potential failures of procedural justice, since such criteria may be neither job-related nor applied transparently. Perceived advantages for personal connections point to failures of distributive justice, where opportunities flow from social proximity rather than merit, while intrusive questions about marriage plans, childbearing intentions, and religious practices constitute failures of interactional justice, violating the respectful treatment candidates are entitled to expect. Tokenism theory helps explain how candidates outside a school’s dominant social or cultural profile may be structurally disadvantaged regardless of competence, a dynamic documented internationally in relation to racial isolation among teachers and in Türkiye in relation to religious visibility.

The findings also expose a legal gap. Article 5 of the Turkish Labor Law No. 4857 governs equal treatment within existing employment relationships but contains no explicit provision addressing discrimination at the application or interview stage. Protection at the recruitment stage instead rests on Article 6 of the Human Rights and Equality Institution Law No. 6701 and Article 122 of the Turkish Penal Code, which criminalizes obstructing employment on grounds including language, race, gender, disability, political opinion, or religion. The authors recommend that private schools restructure recruitment around transparent, measurable, merit-based criteria, train human resources staff to avoid inappropriate interview questions, establish explicit anti-discrimination policies, and monitor hiring regularly. They further suggest that job platforms refuse to publish discriminatory advertisements and that artificial intelligence tools be used to screen and revise such content. Teacher candidates, for their part, should be educated about their legal rights and encouraged to document unfair practices. The study’s limitations include its focus on two platforms over a two-month window and its reliance on the self-reported experiences of 18 teachers, but the authors argue the evidence is sufficient to conclude that merit is occasionally overlooked in private school recruitment, with consequences that can erode professional motivation, damage school climate, and ultimately affect the quality of teaching and learning.

Subject of Research: Discrimination against teachers during recruitment at private schools in Türkiye

Article Title: Discrimination in the recruitment process at private schools in Türkiye

Article References: Discrimination in the recruitment process at private schools in Türkiye. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s44217-026-02197-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44217-026-02197-z

Keywords: teacher recruitment, discrimination, private schools, Türkiye, job interviews, organizational justice, tokenism, gender bias, marital status, appearance discrimination, favoritism, human resource management

The research team, led by investigators affiliated with Tabriz University of Medical Sciences and several other Iranian institutions, set out to examine which coping strategies older adults used during the pandemic and which personal and social factors were associated with those choices. Participants completed the Coping Strategies Questionnaire, a validated instrument that distinguishes between emotion-focused strategies, which regulate the distress generated by a stressor, and problem-focused strategies, which attempt to change the stressor itself. The questionnaire also captures specific tactics within those broad families, including escape-avoidance, positive reappraisal, seeking social support, and planned problem-solving. Alongside the coping measure, respondents answered a socio-economic and health information questionnaire that allowed the researchers to connect coping patterns to marital status, living arrangement, sex, and other characteristics.

The results confirm that the pandemic placed a substantial psychological load on this population. Roughly half of the participants, 50.5 percent, reported frequently experiencing COVID-19-related stress, and 42 percent said they sometimes felt anxious about contracting the disease. These figures align with a broader international literature showing elevated anxiety and distress among older people during the crisis, but they also complicate the stereotype of the frazzled elderly: a majority of respondents were not in constant distress, and their day-to-day behavior suggested a striking degree of practical resilience. Adherence to preventive measures was high, with 87.1 percent reporting mask use and 84.7 percent reporting vaccination, rates that indicate most older adults in the sample translated their concern about infection into concrete protective action.

On the central question of coping style, the data show a modest but consistent tilt toward emotion-focused strategies. Participants scored higher on emotion-focused coping overall, with a mean of 25.88 plus or minus 9.23, than on problem-focused coping, which averaged 24.63 plus or minus 10.18. Within the emotion-focused domain, escape-avoidance was the most commonly used single strategy, at 8.38 plus or minus 2.91, suggesting that many older adults managed pandemic stress primarily by distancing themselves mentally from the threat rather than by confronting it directly. Within the problem-focused domain, positive reappraisal was the most frequent tactic, at 7.65 plus or minus 3.42, indicating that a substantial share of respondents worked to reframe the crisis in more constructive terms, finding meaning or silver linings in an otherwise threatening situation.

The demographic patterns embedded in these averages are arguably the study’s most actionable contribution. Women reported significantly greater use of problem-focused coping strategies than men, a difference that reached statistical significance at p below 0.05. This finding runs counter to some older research traditions that associated emotion-oriented coping with women and problem-solving with men, and it suggests that in this Iranian sample, women were more likely to take active, instrumental steps to manage the pandemic’s demands. The authors note that such differences may reflect gendered patterns of responsibility for household and family welfare, which can push women toward practical engagement with problems even under severe constraints.

Marital status and living arrangement emerged as even sharper dividing lines. Older adults without a spouse and those living alone reported significantly greater use of escape-avoidance coping, with differences reaching p of 0.001 or better. In contrast, participants who had a spouse reported greater use of problem-focused coping overall, along with more frequent seeking of social support and planned problem-solving, all at p below 0.05. The interpretation offered by the researchers is straightforward: a spouse functions as both a practical collaborator and an emotional resource, making it easier to approach problems directly and to draw on shared social networks. An older adult living alone, lacking that immediate partner, may retreat into avoidance as the only readily available means of managing overwhelming stress. This resonates with earlier findings from the coping literature, including systematic reviews linking loneliness to less adaptive coping strategies, and with pandemic-era studies in Switzerland and the Netherlands showing that the quality of social relationships strongly shaped older adults’ well-being during lockdowns.

The theoretical framing of the study draws on the classic transactional model of stress and coping developed by Lazarus and Folkman, which holds that coping outcomes depend on the appraisal of a threat and the resources a person can mobilize against it. Seen through that lens, the elevated escape-avoidance among unpartnered and solo-living elders is not simply a character trait but a signal of depleted coping resources. When a stressor such as a lethal pandemic cannot be escaped physically, and when the social scaffolding for problem-solving is thin, avoidance becomes a default regulatory strategy. The authors argue that the reverse pattern among married participants, who leaned on social support seeking and planned problem-solving, demonstrates how embeddedness in a supportive relationship can convert passive worry into active management.

The findings carry practical weight for public health planning. The researchers conclude that social and living conditions appeared to shape coping patterns among older adults, and they recommend strengthening problem-focused coping strategies as a route to better psychological well-being in future public health crises. In concrete terms, that could mean interventions that pair isolated older adults with trained peers or volunteers, programs that teach reappraisal and structured problem-solving skills, and outreach systems that identify solo-living elders as a priority group for psychological support during emergencies. Because most participants already adhered to masks and vaccination, the unmet need is less about convincing older adults to protect themselves and more about equipping them, especially the unpartnered, with cognitive and social tools to carry the psychological weight of a prolonged crisis.

The study also has limitations worth keeping in view. Its cross-sectional design captures a single moment and cannot establish whether coping strategies caused differences in distress or vice versa. The sample was drawn from community-dwelling older adults in western Iran, so the findings may not generalize to institutionalized elders or to other cultural settings, and the Coping Strategies Questionnaire, while validated in Persian in prior psychometric work, relies on self-report that can be shaped by social desirability. Nevertheless, by documenting who used which strategies at scale, the study adds an important piece to the emerging global picture of pandemic resilience in later life. It suggests that resilience among older adults is not an innate trait distributed evenly across the population, but a capacity that depends heavily on relationships, living circumstances, and the availability of social support. As health systems prepare for future epidemics in aging societies, that message may prove to be the study’s most enduring legacy: protecting the mental health of older adults requires protecting the social connections that make adaptive coping possible.

Subject of Research: Coping strategies and associated factors among Iranian older adults during the COVID-19 pandemic

Article Title: Resilience in the Face of Risk: How Older Adults Coped with COVID-19 pandemic

Article References: Matlabi, H., Abdoli, F., Ahmadi, S., Valiee, S., & Ahmadi, A. (2026). Resilience in the Face of Risk: How Older Adults Coped with COVID-19 pandemic. Ageing International, 51(3), Article 35. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12126-026-09677-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12126-026-09677-5

Keywords: COVID-19, older adults, coping strategies, stress, resilience, escape-avoidance, problem-focused coping, social support, marital status, living alone, gerontology, mental health