Subjective Well-Being Among Elementary School Teachers and its Related Factors: Taking Guangdong Province as an Example Volume 5 - Issue 2

Hou Yongmei* and Wei Lisha Zheng Que

• Department of Psychology, School of Humanity and Administration, Guangdong Medical University, China

Received: April 20, 2021;   Published:April 29, 2021

Corresponding author:Hou Yongmei, Department of Psychology, School of Humanity and Administration, Guangdong Medical University, China

DOI: 10.32474/SJPBS.2021.05.000207

Abstract PDF

Abstract

Objective: To explore the status of subjective well-being of elementary school teachers in Guangdong Province, China, and analyze its related factors.

Method: Totally 1283 elementary school teachers (552 males, 731 females) were selected by Stratified Random sampling from 5 cities in Guangdong Province. They were assessed with satisfaction with life scale (SLS), Affect Scale: Positive Affect, Negative Affect, Affect Balance (AS), Test of Teaeher Competeney (TTC), Social Support Rating scale (SSRS) and a self-edited questionnaire on the general personal information.

Results: The total score of SLS, AS, SWB, TTC and SSRS were (20.44±6.42), (3.46±1.70), (-0.05±2.19), (3.73±0.61) and (33.71±5.52), respectively. The scores of the 9 diagnostic subscales of TTC were all above 3.50, and the score of Lie subscale was (1.87±0.43). Multivariable linear regression showed that the following 10 factors such as education, Personnel arrangement category, professional title, conditions of work, career development prospect, annual income, self-study, health, the total score of TTC and SSRS were positively associated with the score of SWB (β=.219～.780, P=.019～<.001, P < 0.05), the following 5 factors such as sex, head teacher, teaching subjects, marital status and administrative post were negatively associated with the score of SWB (β=-.149～-.413, all P < 0.05).

Conclusion: It is suggested that the subjective well-being of elementary school teachers is on the low side. Career identity and development, as well as life condition may be the related factors of elementary school teachers’ subjective well-being.

Keywords: Elementary School Teachers; Subjective Well-Being; Related Factors; Multivariable Stepwise Linear Regression.

Introduction

Subjective well-being (SWB) can be defined from multiple perspectives. Most researchers agree with the concept put forward by Diener (1984) and believe that subjective well-being is an individual’s overall assessment of their quality of life according to their own standards.

Which includes the following three aspects:

a) Cognition and evaluation of their own quality of life (i.e., life satisfaction); and

b) Positive emotions include happy, meaningful life, full of spirit and other emotional experience.

c) Negative emotions include anxiety, depression, sadness, loneliness, boredom and discomfort and other emotional experience, but not affective disorder and neurosis.

It can be seen that subjective well-being has the following three basic characteristics:

a) Subjectivity: The evaluation of subjective well-being mainly depends on the standards set by oneself rather than the external standards, so subjective reporting method is often used to evaluate.

b) Integrity: subjective well-being reflects the overall subjective quality of life of the individual.

c) Relative stability: subjective well-being does not change significantly with the passing of time or the general change of environment [1].

Primary school teachers have made important contributions to China’s basic education, trained generations of children for millions of families, and provided batch after batch of reserve talents for the society. However, due to various factors, the subjective wellbeing of primary school teachers is relatively low, which affects the work enthusiasm and effectiveness of primary school teachers to a certain extent [2-3]. In recent years, with the implementation of a series of national basic education policies and the improvement of the developmental environment, the subjective well-being of primary school teachers has attracted more and more attention from all walks of life. There is few domestic research on the factors influencing the subjective well-being of primary school teachers. Most of the previous research focus on limited two or three factors, and the factors involved are different [2-3]. It is unable to systematically reveal the influencing factors and the mechanism of the subjective well-being. Based on the above analysis, this study intends to adopt a large sample multi center empirical research to systematically expound the status and various influencing factors such as the demographic factors, teaching related factors and personal factors of primary school teachers’ subjective well-being.

Object and Methods

Object

Sample size estimation

the minimum sample size is calculated by g.power3.0 [4]. This method needs to be based on the incidence, but subjective well-being is a continuous variable, only with high and low points, without whether or not points, so cannot directly use subjective well-being to calculate the sample size. As depression is a common psychological disorder, which plays an important role in predicting subjective well-being, so we use the prevalence rate of primary school teachers’ depression to calculate the sample size. Previous studies showed that the incidence rate of depression among primary school teachers in China was 7.70% to 57.60% [5- 8], and the median test effect was d, which was 0.50 to 0.80 [9]. In this study, the effect value d = 0.70, the statistical test power 1 - β = 0.80, and the class I error probability α = 0.05 are set. The minimum sample size needed for the survey is calculated as 846. The minimum sample size is determined as 1016 due to a potential loss rate of 20%.

Sampling

By stratified random sampling, a total of 1400 primary school teachers were selected from Shenzhen, Jiangmen, Zhuhai, Shanwei and Zhanjiang from April 2020 to May 2020. Inclusive criteria: over 20 years old, normal spirit and intelligence, more than 1 year of teaching in primary school. Exclusion criteria: those who could not complete the scale due to serious physical diseases, mental disorders and other reasons. In fact, 1368 people met, with a visit rate of 97.7%. Among them, 9 (0.6%) were positive by mini mental state examination (MMSE) and 76 (5.4%) were not willing to cooperate with the survey. A total of 1283 people completed the survey, and the effective rate was 91.6%. Among them, there were 361 from Shenzhen, 418 from Jiangmen, 206 from Zhuhai, 102 from Shanwei and 196 from Zhanjiang; the average age was (33.8 ± 10.6) years old; 318 from 20 to 30 years old, 354 from 30 to 40 years old, 327 from 40 to 50 years old and 284 from 50 to 60 years old; 485 unmarried, 257 divorced, 48 widowed and 493 married; 337 from senior high school or technical secondary school, 439 from junior college, 473 undergraduates and 34 with master’s degree; 853 from city or town, 430 from rural; 417 substitute teachers and 866 teachers in the personnel establishment.

Tools

Subjective well-being scale (SWBS)

It includes two parts: Life Satisfaction Scale and Emotion Scale. Subjective well-being level (SWB) is the score of life satisfaction plus emotional balance.

Satisfaction with Life Scale (SLS)

It is compiled by Diener (1985) [10] and used to evaluate the satisfaction with oneself’ s life and the closeness to his (or her) ideal life. SLS includes five items. The likert 7-point scoring method is used to score from 1 to 7 points corresponding to “strongly against” to “strongly for”. The higher the total score, the higher the degree of life satisfaction. In this study, the cronbach’a coefficient of the scale is 0.824.

Affect scale: positive affect, negative affect, affect balance (AS)

It is compiled by Bradburn (1969) and revised by fan Xiaodong into Chinese version [11], which is used to assess the emotions and life evaluation of the general population in the past few weeks. There are 10 items, which are divided into three dimensions: positive emotion, negative emotion and emotional balance. If the answer is “yes” to the positive emotion item, 1 point will be scored; if the answer is “no” to the negative emotion item, 1 point will also be scored. The emotional balance is calculated by subtracting the negative emotional score from the positive emotional score and adding a coefficient of 5. In this study, the cronbach’a coefficient of the total table is 0.886, and the cronbach’a coefficient of each dimension is 0.814-0.837.

Test of teaeher competency (TTC)

I it is compiled by Xu Jianping [12] to evaluate the professional competence of primary and secondary school teachers. There are 50 items, which are divided into 10 subscales: personal characteristics (TRI), focus on students (FCN), professionalism (EXP), interpersonal communication (ICO), relationship building (RB), information collection (INFO), professional preference (PP), respect for others (RO), understanding others (UO), lie detection (LIE). The 5-point scoring method is used to score from 1 to 5 points corresponding to “completely inconsistent” to 5 “completely consistent”. The higher the score, the stronger the professional competence. In this study, the cronbach’a coefficient of the total scale is 0.894, and the cronbach’a coefficient of each subscale is 0.815-0.845.

Social support rating scale (SSRS)

it is compiled by Xiao Shui yuan [13] to evaluate the social support and its utilization. There are 10 items, which are divided into three dimensions: objective support (i.e., the actual support received), subjective support (i.e. the support that can be experienced or emotional), and utilization of support (i.e. the active use of various social support, including the way of talking, the way of asking for help, and the situation of participating in activities). The higher the score, the higher the degree of social support. Generally speaking, the total score of less than 20 is to get less social support, 20～30 is to get general social support, and > 30 is to get satisfactory social support. In this study, the cronbach’a coefficient of the total scale is 0.907, and the cronbach’a coefficient of each dimension is 0.830～0.879.

Mini mental state examination (MMSE)

It is also known as simple mental state checklist, compiled by folstein et al (1975) and reviewed by Zhang mingyun[14] into Chinese version, which is the most authoritative cognitive screening scale in the world. MMSE has five items, including time and location orientation, language (retelling, naming, understanding of instructions), mental calculation, immediate and short-term auditory word memory, visual structure imitation, mainly for simple assessment of orientation, memory, language, calculation and attention, etc. the test takes 5-10 minutes. MMSE is simple to operate, and has high reliability, validity, specificity and sensitivity. The total score of the scale was 30, the dividing value was illiteracy group ≤ 17, primary school group ≤ 20, middle school or above group ≤ 24. Cognitive dysfunction existed when the score is below the threshold. In this study, the Cronbach ‘a coefficient of the scale is 0.811.

Self-compiled questionnaire for the related factors of elementary school teachers’ subjective well-being.

The CNKI, Wanfang database, VIP database, Baidu, Pubmed and other search engines are used to search the literatures about subjective well-being among elementary school teachers (206 in Chinese and 13067 in foreign). Based on that, the basic content of the questionnaire is constructed, with a total of 28 items. Combined with the results of 3 collective discussions with 10 representatives of elementary school teachers and 5 experts in the field of elementary education, 4 items were deleted, and 1 items were added. The final questionnaire for related factors of elementary school teachers’ subjective well-being consists of 25 items, including gender, age, teaching age, teaching grade, marital status, how many children do you have, education, professional title, teaching subjects, posts, whether a head teacher, category of personnel arragement, administrative region of school, health, selfstudy, work environment, occupation development prospect, selfevaluation of performance, colleague evaluation of performance, annual income, time to work, rationality of performance evaluation, physical exercise, tourism and so on.

Collection and Arrangement of Data

Before the investigation, the researchers who participated in the survey were trained uniformly, and the investigation process and evaluation standard were unified. The consistency test (kappa = 0.81~ 0.90) met the test requirements. The questionnaires with scores of more than 50% of the items missing were eliminated. The missing values of the valid questionnaires were estimated and filled with the average. Two researchers independently input the same data using Epidata3.0 software and conduct a unified logic check to ensure the accuracy of the data.

Statistical methods

Data was exported from epidata3.0 to SPSS 20.0 for statistical analysis. The main statistical methods include descriptive statistics and multiple linear regression analysis.

Ethical licensing

The procedure of this study is in accordance with the ethical standards set by the ethics committee of Department of Education of Guangdong Province and approved by the Committee.

Results

Descriptive statistics

The total average score of SWB was (-0.05 ± 2.19), and the total average score of TTC and SSRS were (3.73 ± 0.61) and (33.71 ± 5.52), respectively. It shows that the subjective well-being of primary school teachers in this group is on the low side, and their competence is on the high side. They get more satisfactory social support, as shown in Table 1.

Regression analysis

Variable assignment

First, values are assigned to the possible situations (alternative answers) of 25 categorical variables (including demographic variables and psychosocial variables) that may affect the total score of SWB, and the results are shown in Table 2.

multiple stepwise linear regression analysis on influencing factors of SWB score

Taking the score of SWB as the dependent variable and 25 categorical variables, the total score of TTC and SSRS as independent variables, the multiple stepwise linear regression analysis is carried out within 95% confidence interval. From Table 3, it can be seen that the score of SWB is positively correlated with education, category of personnel arrangement, professional title, working environment, career developmental prospect, annual income, selfstudy, health status, total score of TTC and SSRS (β =. 219 ~. 780, all P < 0.05) . Gender, head teacher, teaching subjects, marital status and posts are negatively correlated with the total score of SWB (β = - 0.149～-. 413, all P < 0.05).

Discussion

The score of SWB is (- 0.05±2.19), and the total score of TTC and SSRS are (3.731±0.61) and (71 0 ±5.52), respectively. It is consistent with the results of previous literature [15-18], suggesting that the subjective well-being of this group is low, the competency of teachers is generally in the upper middle level, and they get more satisfactory social support. Multiple stepwise linear regression analysis shows that education, personnel arrangement category, professional title, working environment, career development prospect, annual income, self-study, health status, total score of TTC and SSRS are positively correlated with the score of SWB, while gender, head teacher, teaching subjects, marital status and posts were negatively correlated with the score of SWB.

This study finds that there is a significant correlation between gender and subjective well-being of primary school teachers, which is consistent with the results of Wang Wenting [19], Fu Hongmei [20] and Guo Jing [21], suggesting that gender has an important influence on career, which may be due to the different personality characteristics and career expectation of men and women. Education and self-study are positively correlated with the subjective well-being of primary school teachers. The higher the education level and self-study enthusiasm, the stronger the subjective well-being, which is consistent with the results of Wang Wenting [19]. To a certain extent, the level of education reflects the individual’s intelligence level and working foundation. Those with higher education background and efforts have mastered more professional knowledge and more advanced education and teaching skills and are more likely to be competent for teaching work. With the development of economy and education, the requirement of primary school teachers’ education is higher and higher. In recent years, primary school teachers are required to have bachelor’s degree. Teachers with diploma of secondary normal school or junior college can no longer meet the needs of educational development, which urges the majority of primary school teachers to participate in various kinds of training to improve their academic qualification and professional skills. Therefore, the lower the education level, the greater the pressure of further education and the lower their happiness.

This study finds that the subjective well-being of teachers in charge of a class is lower than that of other teachers, the subjective well-being of primary school teachers who teach mathematics, Chinese, English and other quiz required subjects is lower than that of teachers teaching other subjects, the subjective well-being of teachers in administrative positions is lower than that of other teachers, the subjective well-being of married teachers is lower than that of unmarried teachers. It is consistent with the results of previous research [18-21], suggesting that social role and work pressure affect subjective well-being. Compared with unmarried teachers, teachers who are not in charge of a class, teachers in charge of non-quiz required subjects and teachers who are not engaged in administrative work, married teachers, head teachers, teachers teaching quiz required subjects and teachers who are engaged in administrative work have more heavy tasks, greater work pressure, longer working hours and more dispersion, they not only need to work in school, but also often in leisure time. So, they have less rest and leisure, and are more prone to physical and mental fatigue, thus reducing their sense of happiness. The subjective well-being of the substitute teachers is lower than that of the teachers in the personnel establishment. At present, there are still 3% primary school teachers in China who are substitute teachers. Their situation can be summarized as the following sentences: “they are teachers, but they often have no teacher’s treatment, lack of training leads to insufficient development assistance, unable to make ends meet and have no support for the elderly, and the prospect of hard work is not clear”. This dilemma makes substitute teachers face greater survival pressure in the accelerated development of society [22]. TTC total score and professional title are positively correlated with subjective well-being of primary school teachers, consistent with the results of previous research [2,18]. It is suggested that the professional quality not only affects the work effect of teachers, but also affects the teachers’ life feeling. TTC total score is the subjective evaluation of teachers’ work ability, values and other professional qualities, while the professional title is the recognition of the comprehensive quality of the individual (including the professional and technical level) by the school and society. The lower the total score of TTC, the more the teachers think they are not competent for teaching; the lower the professional title, especially the professional title not corresponding to the teaching age, The more seriously their comprehensive quality (not only the professional and technical level) is not recognized by the work unit and society, which is more prone to frustration, and the job burnout is more easily caused by the feeling of “pay - get imbalance [23]”, thus reducing the subjective well-being.

Health status is a positive predictor of primary school teachers’ subjective well-being, which is consistent with Guo Jing’s [3] and Rory’s [21] research results, suggesting that physiological and mental function play important roles in life experience. Poor health condition can easily cause discomfort and loss of sense of the individual (including physiological and social functions). Because of the high work pressure and less activity, primary school teachers become the high incidence group of occupational diseases, which greatly hinders their work efficiency and quality of life, and easily leads to depression, anxiety and other negative emotions [8], thus reducing subjective well-being. Social support level was positively correlated with SWB score, which was consistent with the previous study [24,25]. Social support has a positive predictive effect on the subjective well-being of different groups [26-27], which is confirmed in this study. Social support is based on sufficient interpersonal understanding and harmonious interpersonal relationship, which not only provides material support and emotional comfort for the parties, but also provides feasible coping methods to help them solve problems, successfully overcome difficulties, reduce the level of physical and mental stress, and maintain mental health and subjective well-being. The career development prospect, working environment, annual income are positively correlated with the subjective well-being of primary school teachers, consistent with the results of zhangguyue and Ren zhengpan [19,28], suggesting that occupational value plays an important role in promoting the subjective well-being. Generally speaking, the higher the social value (being paid attention to by the society), the better the prospect of the occupation, the more comfortable the working environment, the higher the level of welfare and income, the stronger the professional acquisition and subjective well-being [29].

Conclusion

There are many influencing factors of primary school teachers’ subjective well-being, which can be summarized into two categories: one is positive, mainly the living resources and working condition, including material resources, such as income, and spiritual resources, such as social support, education level, etc; the other is negative, mainly the subjective life difficulties, such as staffing constraints, unclear career prospect, poor health, etc.

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