Abstract
Objectives: Teacher connectedness is an important factor for young people’s well-being. The aim of this paper was to examine teacher connectedness in detail and its potential association with emotional well-being. More specifically, we set out to analyse whether teacher connectedness acted as a universal asset for boys and girls of different ages and countries as well as across adolescents with differing perceptions of their performance at school. Methods: The study sample consisted of 9,444 young people aged 11, 13 and 15 years who had taken part in the World Health Organization (WHO) collaborative survey Health Behaviour in School-aged Children in Spain and England. After examining differences in teacher connectedness associated with demographic factors, we used general linear models to analyse the relationship between teacher connectedness and emotional well-being (including interaction teacher connectedness by country) across different age and performance-derived groups. Results: Results indicated some significant differences in teacher connectedness associated with age, country and perceived performance, but a consistent positive association between teacher connectedness and emotional well-being regardless of demographic factors, country and perceptions of school performance. Older adolescents and low achievers reported lower level of connectedness to their teachers, but the association between teacher connectedness and emotional well-being operated irrespective of adolescents’ age and perceived performance at school. Conclusion: Results support the perspective that teacher connectedness can act as a significant health asset that operates irrespective of key demographic factors, while they point to some inequalities in teacher connectedness associated with age and performance at school. These findings have significant implications for health promotion interventions.
Highlights
Promoting young people’s well-being is a key goal for health promotion
This study focuses on the school setting as an opportunity for promoting subjective well-being (SWB), as positive experiences in educational settings have already been identified as key to overall life chances in later years (Department for Education, 2011; Suldo et al, 2011).Existing evidence shows that positive school experiences, greater school engagement and higher levels of academic achievement are associated with higher levels of SWB (Gilman and Huebner, 2006; Gutman and Vorhaus, 2012)
The findings presented in this paper indicated a consistent positive effect of teacher connectedness on subjective emotional well-being that appeared to operate regardless of gender, country and age, thereby providing evidence to support the perspective that teacher connectedness can act as a significant health asset, and importantly one that operates irrespective of key demographic factors
Summary
Promoting young people’s well-being is a key goal for health promotion Such efforts are conceptually framed by studies that focus on positive paradigms to understand adolescent health and development. Two such examples include positive youth development (Damon, 2004; Lerner, et al, 2009) and the health asset model (Morgan, 2010; Morgan, Davies and Ziglio, 2010). Such perspectives focus on enhancing the capacity and capabilities of young people to successfully negotiate every day stressors in order that a sense of well-being can be maintained. It suggests that the more opportunities young people have in childhood and adolescence to experience and accumulate the positive effects of a range of protective factors or ‘health assets’ that outweigh negative risk factors, the more likely they are to achieve and sustain health and well-being through adolescence and beyond (Morgan, 2010; Oliva et al, 2010)
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