Abstract
Teachers’ healthy and effective functioning at work is impacted by the demands they face and the resources they can access. In this study, person-centered analysis was adopted to identify distinct teacher profiles of demands and resources. We investigated teachers’ experiences of two job demands (barriers to professional development and disruptive student behavior), two job resources (teacher collaboration and input in decision-making), and one personal resource (self-efficacy for teaching). Using data from the Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) 2013, the study involved 6,411 teachers from 369 schools in Australia and 2,400 teachers from 154 schools in England. In phase one, latent profile analysis revealed five teacher profiles that were similar across the two countries: the Low-Demand-Flourisher (12%), Mixed-Demand-Flourisher (17%), Job-Resourced-Average (34%), Balanced-Average (15%), and Struggler (21%). The profiles were differently associated with two background characteristics (teacher gender and teaching experience) and two work-related well-being outcomes (job satisfaction and occupational commitment). In phase two, we extended our analysis to the school-level to identify school profiles based on the relative prevalence of the five teacher profiles within a school. Indeed, a yield of large scale datasets such as TALIS is that there are sufficient units at the school-level to enable institutional insights, beyond insights garnered at the individual teacher-level. Two school profiles that were similar in both countries were revealed: the Unsupportive school profile (58%) and the Supportive school profile (42%). The Supportive school profile was associated with higher school-average teacher job satisfaction and occupational commitment than the Unsupportive school profile. Taken together, the findings yield knowledge about salient teacher and school profiles, and provide guidance for possible interventions at the teacher- and school level.
Highlights
As recommended by Morin et al (2016) we considered that profile similarity was supported when two indicators out of the Consistent Akaike Information Criteria (CAIC), Bayesian Information Criteria (BIC), and sample-size-adjusted Bayesian Information Criteria (SSA-BIC) were lower for the more constrained models relative to the previous model in the sequence
Within-country Confirmatory factor analyses (CFA) provided correlations between all variables examined in the study
These results revealed that, each step of the sequence of similarity tests resulted in a decrease in the value of the CAIC, BIC, and SSA-BIC, supporting the complete similarity of the solution across countries
Summary
A growing body of research has examined the role of job demands (e.g., disruptive student behavior), job resources (e.g., social support), and personal resources (e.g., adaptability) in predicting teachers’ well-being at work (e.g., Desrumaux et al, 2015; Collie and Martin, 2017; Dicke et al, 2018; Skaalvik and Skaalvik, 2018). This prior work has tended to use variable-centered approaches (e.g., multiple/multivariate regression models within the structural equation modeling framework) that describe how the factors are interrelated (e.g., the association between job resources and well-being; Collie et al, 2018). Person-centered approaches reveal knowledge of how intervention efforts can be tailored to the needs of each of these profiles
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