The development of scales to measure teacher and school executive occupational satisfaction

Abstract

Interest in teacher “stress” and its relationship to teacher well‐being has a long and distinguished history. However, there has been criticism of this research endeavour for its conceptual narrowness and lack of psychometric rigour. An international project investigating teacher and school executive career satisfaction, motivation and mental health is initiated. This project sought to develop a model of teachers’ occupational well‐being that was wider than a focus on “stress”, and, as noted, included occupational motivation and satisfaction. This paper reports on a sub‐aspect of that research, the development of scales to measure teacher and school executive satisfaction with the work of teaching and its context carried out in Australia, England, New Zealand and the USA. Separate teams recruited participants in each of the four countries, giving a final sample of 3,000 teachers and school executive. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses of the Australian data resulted in a ten factor model, which was validated on the English and New Zealand data. Analyses of the US data resulted in a 16 factor model. As well as revealing relative satisfaction with various facets of the teaching role, these scales also prove useful in explaining how teachers and school executive view the construction of their respective educational and social contexts.