The workplace PERMA-profiler: wellbeing of compulsory school teachers
Teaching can be stressful, and great demands are placed on teachers. In Iceland, as in many other countries, there is a teacher shortage. A report from the VIRK vocational rehabilitation center in Iceland points out that teachers are among the largest groups of workers requiring their services. Stre...
| Published in: | Netla |
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| Main Authors: | , , |
| Format: | Article in Journal/Newspaper |
| Language: | Icelandic |
| Published: |
Menntavísindasvið Háskóla Íslands
2022
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://ojs.hi.is/netla/article/view/3534 https://doi.org/10.24270/netla.2022.3 |
| Summary: | Teaching can be stressful, and great demands are placed on teachers. In Iceland, as in many other countries, there is a teacher shortage. A report from the VIRK vocational rehabilitation center in Iceland points out that teachers are among the largest groups of workers requiring their services. Stress, high demands, and mental strain in this profession frequently lead to teacher burnout, with negative consequences at individual and societal levels. Therefore, it is critical to maintain and increase the wellbeing of teachers in Iceland and to promote positive work experiences for the country’s compulsory school teachers. A quantitative study was conducted to measure teachers’ wellbeing at work, based on the PERMA model, which falls within positive psychology, a field geared towards identifying what makes life worth living.The aim of the present study was twofold. First, to translate the workplace PERMAprofiler from English into Icelandic and to test the scale’s reliability and validity, and secondly, to use the scale to measure the wellbeing of Iceland’s compulsory school teachers.The measuring instrument is based on Seligman’s PERMA theory of wellbeing, which was developed to combine hedonic and eudaimonic approaches to wellbeing. Wellbeing is viewed in terms of five factors: positive emotions, engagement, positive relationships, meaning and accomplishment. The workplace PERMA-profiler includes an overall measure of wellbeing based on the five factors, questions about negative emotions and loneliness, and a question about overall work satisfaction. To measure the profiler’s validity, a question about overall happiness in life was added to the questionnaire. The workplace PERMA-profiler was translated into Icelandic and pre-tested before it was used to collect data from members of the Icelandic Teachers’ Union (N = 4847; response rate 42%). The reliability of the results was acceptable to good in the range of 0.70–0.86 for individual factors and 0.89 for the overall wellbeing scale. The correlations between the ... |
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