Teachers’ subjective happiness and self-efficacy in Dominican Republic and Spain

Abstract

This study examines the relationship between subjective happiness levels and teacher self-efficacy in a sample of 454 teachers at all educational levels (from kindergarten to University) of Dominican Republic and Spain. To do this, we used the Subjective Happiness Scale (Lyubomirsky & Lepper, 1999), which assesses the general happiness, and Teachers’ Sense of Teacher Efficacy Scale (Tschannen-Moran & Woolfolk, 2001), which measures three dimensions: Efficacy in Student Engagement, Efficacy in Instructional Practices, and Efficacy in Classroom Management. The results show significant and positive correlations between subjective happiness scores and the three dimensions of teacher efficacy. Also, the Dominican population obtains higher scores than the Spanish population in all constructs analyzed. Depending on the results found, which corroborate previous research in the field of positive psychology (Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi, 2000), we propose the incorporation of emotional education training plans for teachers, since subjective happiness as part of individual emotions, is a factor with high positive implications for successfully carrying out professional challenges posed by the task of education.