"I wasn't prepared for this": a grounded theory study of student teachers' stressors and coping mechanisms during teaching internship in physical education.

Grounded in the transactional model of stress and coping and the conservation of resources theory, this study employed a grounded theory approach to systematically investigate the stressors, coping mechanisms, and professional identity formation among elementary school physical education student teachers during their teaching internship. Semi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted with 30 student teachers in a city in western China. Using NVivo 15.0 for three-level coding analysis, an integrated theoretical model centered on "stress events, cognitive appraisal, coping strategies, adaptation outcomes, and a feedback loop" was constructed. The findings reveal that the stressors experienced by physical education student teachers are teaching centered, characterized by task complexity and interpersonal dynamics, fundamentally stemming from an imbalance between resource supply and demand. Cognitive appraisals fell into three types: challenging controllable, threatening uncontrollable, and helplessness. These appraisals, respectively, led to three categories of coping strategies: resource gain oriented, resource protection oriented, and resource depletion oriented. Positive adaptation outcomes, such as enhanced teaching competence and strengthened professional identity, or negative outcomes, including burnout and low self-efficacy, resulted from different coping strategies. Adaptation outcomes subsequently regulated subsequent cognitive and coping behaviors through a feedback mechanism. Based on these findings, the proposed interventions target four dimensions: optimizing resource supply, strengthening cognitive guidance, cultivating coping strategies, and constructing support systems. This study offers theoretical and practical support for improving the quality of physical education internships and cultivating high quality physical education teachers.