Preschool and primary teachers -psychological differences and similarities

Abstract

Our paper focuses on differences in psychological profile between preschool and primary school teachers. The variables we considered were the stress and professional satisfaction and the hypotheses are looking for differences between preschool and primary school teachers regarding stress and professional satisfaction. We applied instruments adapted to the Romanian population: JSS WLCS, (both developed by Prof Spector) on a group of 96 teachers from primary and preschool, using two. Results showed suggestive differences on the level of stress that varies on subscales indicator (interpersonal conflict, workload and symptoms) and on the subscales of job satisfaction (promotion, rewards immediate, working conditions and nature of the work). Conclusions lead us to say that although teachers are trained in higher education for both majors, then when they get to practice, challenges and sources of satisfaction are significantly different, which makes a graduate not to be equal to work as a preschool or primary school teacher and, of course, cannot really benefit from the double specialization unless the initial training programs at academic level train them to face these differences.