Using anchoring vignettes to measure teacher well-being in Honduras, Haiti, and Liberia: Developing context-specific measures of well-being

• In Event: Prioritizing Teachers in Fragile and Crisis Contexts: Contextually-Grounded Approaches to Understanding Teacher Well-being in a Digital Age - Part 2

Proposal

Scholars studying teacher well-being have drawn on five research fields (Hascher and Waber, 2021): (1) subjective constructions of well-being, (2) assets-focused approaches to flourishing, (3) Job Demands-Resources Model focusing on positive and negative indicators of functioning, (4) teacher’s judgments and motivations about their occupation, and (5) health across physical, social, emotional, and mental domains. While the five research fields have resulted in differing definitions of what constitutes the core constructs of teacher well-being and the conditions/factors affecting these core constructs, a common assumption is that teacher well-being is normative and depends on the context within which teachers are embedded. Measurement of TWB has to account for this subjectivity and the environment around teachers. However, this assumption is not always reflected in the extant academic literature (Zhang et al. 2023). A majority of the teacher well-being assessments have been designed for use in high-resource contexts. If we want to understand teacher well-being in the majority world, we need more measures that are developed with and for teachers working in these complex, low-resource, and fragile contexts.

This paper contributes to a broader discussion on teacher well-being, focusing on the validation of context-specific teacher well-being assessments in Honduras, Haiti, and Liberia. We worked with teachers to identify and prioritize how they defined well-being and the factors that they believed affected this core construct. In Honduras, the factors included the socioeconomic situation, teaching vocation, mental and physical health, and administrative leadership. In Liberia, the main factors were remuneration and financing, teaching attitude and commitment, training, teaching practices, and professional conduct. In Haiti, the identified factors were intrinsic motivation, social support and connection, teacher professionalism, and quality work environments. We used anchoring vignettes, based on the work of King and colleagues (2007, 2010), to account for structural differences in how teachers perceive well-being. Anchoring teachers’ self-assessments helps reduce structured biases in responses and helps avoid social desirability bias. The vignettes also provided a reference to help teachers better understand the questions by presenting hypothetical situations of other teachers before reflecting on their own experiences.

We collected data from 658 teachers in Honduras, 629 teachers in Haiti, and 924 teachers in Liberia, focusing our analysis on the structure of the underlying constructs, divergent validity, measurement invariance, and internal consistency reliability. While the identification and prioritization of constructs varied across the three countries, a common scale measuring teacher satisfaction, stress, and burnout was applied in all contexts. This allowed for meaningful cross-country comparisons despite the diversity of local constructs. Our analysis established the validity and reliability of the scores from the three different study sites, opening the door for further studies to use these measures. However, contrary to our hypothesis, the results showed that country-specific constructs did not significantly correlate with the common scale of teacher stress and burnout. Our presentation will focus on the use of Anchoring Vignettes, the psychometrics from the three pilots, and the implications for future uses of these measures in programs focused on addressing teacher well-being in low-resource and fragile contexts.

Authors

• Mariana Arboleda, Universidad del Norte, Colombia

• Nikhit D'Sa, University of Notre Dame