Teachers’ Emotions: Validation of the Teacher Emotions Scales in Albanian

Abstract

The topic of teacher emotions has gained increasing research attention over the past years. Initial predominantly qualitative inquiry methods have been complemented by quantitative ones, and different instruments to measure teacher emotions have been developed. These instruments mainly stem from Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) countries, and yet it is still unknown if these instruments are of universal cultural functionality. The current study aimed to validate the Teacher Emotions Scale (TES) in the low-to-middle income, Southeastern European country of Kosovo. Findings from N = 258 teachers in Kosovo provide evidence that TES-Albanian operates equivalently in terms of factor structure as the original German version of TES and the English version. Supporting the external validity of the scale, we found consistent low-to-medium relationships between the three emotions measured with the TES (enjoyment, anger, and anxiety) with other teachers’ experiential and behavioral constructs such as positive and negative affect, job satisfaction, burnout, self-efficacy, and the teacher–student relationship. Overall, we conclude that TES can effectively be translated into different languages to measure teacher emotions also in non-WEIRD cultural contexts.