The main purpose of this study was to determine work-related stress, coping strategies, and health-related quality of life among lecturers at NAU. Table 1 shows that a total of 283 participants were recruited for this study, consisting of males 119 (42%), and females 164 (58%). The mean scores of the active coping, work-related stress, and QOWL were shown in Table 2. According to the current study (Table 3), the age of the participants has a statistically significant relationship with their coping experience (p = 0.00). The ability to cope with the functional demands of a particular field would be dependent on the age of the participants. As the participants advance in age their active coping ability either increases or decreases. It may be assumed that older person because of their work experience may have gotten more experience and a better strategy to cope with the intricacies of doing their daily routine. This study (Table 3) equally revealed that there is no relationship between age and work-related stress (p = 0.96). It may be appropriate to opine from this finding that work-related stress does neither increase nor decrease as one age in a particular field, in this case, lecturing, probably because of a better coping experience. Table 3 shows that the relationship between age and QOWL was, however, found to be statistically significant (p = 0.03). This can be attributed to work satisfaction, experience, work-life balance, financial remunerations, and working conditions which tend to improve as one ages in a particular work setting. Those who have stayed longer in lecturing would most likely enjoy the better condition of service unlike the younger ones, hence their quality of work life would improve. This finding is in agreement with that of a previous study [24] and contrasts with the findings of another study [25]. However, previous studies have revealed that younger academics experienced more stress than their older counterparts [25, 26]. The reason for this difference may be because the older lecturers may have adopted adequate coping strategies to deal with stress and may also think that they are at the pinnacle of their career and so do not stress themselves beyond their limits. The relationship in teaching experience across coping, stress, and QOWL scores was found not to be significant (Table 3). The relationship between academic rank and coping was found to be statistically significant while across stress and quality of work life it was found not to be statistically significant. There is no statistically significant relationship between years of practice and work-related stress. This posits that working experience will not have any effect on work-related stress. Those who have long working experience may feel more stress than those with lesser working experience and vice versa. We speculate that this finding may be true because the environment of work can contribute to the level of stress inherent in it. Those who work in a stressful environment will feel more stress irrespective of years of experience. The young lecturers who have not spent so many years in service might feel less work-related stress if the environmental factors that contribute to stress were controlled. Interestingly, this agrees with the finding of the previous studies that reported no difference in the stress outcome of lecturers who have spent long years and those who have spent lesser years [25, 26,27,]. However, the finding of a previous study contradicts the above finding by reporting that the level of stress among experienced and inexperienced lecturers was significant because the stress was less experienced by those who have practiced for a longer time as they have adopted adequate coping strategies over the years to deal with the stress [24]. There was no significant relationship between the coping experience and years of practice among the respondents. This implies that the lecturer's years of practice do not affect their coping experience. We tend to agree with this finding because we believe that the ability of an individual to adopt a favorable coping strategy might not rely solely on years of practice but on other factors such as the respondent's attitude towards coping, and the capacity to evolve a good coping skill. This is, however, contrary to a previous study that reported that with increased years of practice comes the ability to cope with the presenting workload, job satisfaction, financial remunerations, and family issues [24]. Age and quality of QOWL among lecturers in the institution studied were found to have a significant relationship. Surprisingly, this research revealed that the age of lecturers affected their quality of life. This could be attributed to reduced workloads, increased number of subordinates, and increased performance of leisure activities. We assume that older lecturers might have gotten exposed to not only knowing what quality of life entails but to embrace it. They may not be too involved in so many responsibilities as they would delegate responsibilities to younger ones to ease the stress on them. We believe that with an improved coping strategy that older lecturers would have time to take care of their lives, unlike when there is a poor coping strategy. A statistically significant relationship exists between age and QOWL. This implies that the age of the participants would affect their ability to adjust and adapt to work demands. This is in agreement with a previous finding that lecturers who have practiced for 15 years and above have adopted adequate coping strategies over the years to deal with the stress [24]. Lecturers who are more advanced in age tend to develop means of coping with the realities of the job in contrast to younger lecturers. Part of the strategies deployed by the older lecturers may be the delegation of certain academic responsibilities to the junior ones. This will help to strengthen the coping skills of the older lecturers while complicating those of the younger ones. We also speculate that because the promotion of lecturers in Nigeria's educational system draws a greater percentage of points from the literary output, like the publication of research in scientific journals, younger lecturers are also laden with the issue of article publications to earn promotion, hence whittling their coping capacity. Years of practice and quality of life among the lecturers were found not to have a statistical significant relationship. The implication is that the number of years spent lecturing does not influence the quality of life of the lecturers. This could be a result of poor job satisfaction, an unmanageable student population, poor interpersonal relationship among staff, and a lack of instructional resources. We speculate that the welfare package available to the lecturers can contribute significantly to their subsisting quality of life. If the welfare package is poor, it might impact the capacity of the respondents to have access to the good things of life that would contribute to their having an improved quality of life. This entails that being long in service is not a guarantee for lecturers to have a good quality of life.
The current study (Table 4) found that there was a statistically significant relationship between gender and work-related stress scores among lecturers at NAU. This suggests that gender will affect work-related stress scores meaning that all participants would experience different work-related stress scores based on gender. Explicitly, being a male or a female contributes to the level of work-related stress felt by the lecturers. However, this finding does not agree with previous studies which reported there was no statistically significant relationship between gender and work-related stress, they attributed the outcome to the fact that both the male and female lecturers experience the same kind of organizational pressure [27, 28]. However, a study stated that there was a weak relationship between work-related stress and gender [29]. Also, there is a statistically significant relationship between gender and coping mechanisms among lecturers at NAU (Table 4). The current study found that male lecturers were found to be more tolerant of the working demands in contrast to their female counterparts. This could be subject to the dual role occupied by the female lecturers who combine their lecturing job and their role as mothers. This study revealed that the gender of lecturers affected their ability to adjust and adapt to their work demands. This finding, however, was not supported by the report of a previous study that male lecturers used less social coping than females [30]. In emotionally focused coping, females cope to stress better than males. In self-controlling coping strategies, it's shown that males cope with stress more than their female counterparts and there is a significant difference in the coping to stress between male and female lecturers [30]. Interestingly, this research revealed that the relationship between gender and QOWL among the respondents was found not to be significant. This supposes that gender does not have any effect on the quality of life of lecturers at NAU. This is contrary to the previous finding that stated that the quality of life of female teachers is worse than that of male teachers [31]. We believe that this might depend on the environment of study, and the condition of service which could vary from one educational institution to the other. Where the environment of work and the condition of service are favorable to either the male or female lecturers, the quality of life could tilt