Early Childhood Teachers’ Psychological Well-being and Responsiveness towards Children: A U.S.-Korea Cross-Cultural Comparison

• In Event: Promoting well-being, social-emotional development and executive functioning in early childhood classrooms

Abstract

Teachers’ positive and supportive reactions play a pivotal role in nurturing social and emotional competence among children (e.g. Denham et al., 2012). One of the key predictors of positive teacher responsiveness is teachers’ psychological well-being (e.g. Buettner et al., 2016). Although early care and education (ECE) teachers’ psychological well-being is strongly associated with high quality practices in ECE across many countries (Cumming, 2017), the degree of psychological well-being and its impact on teachers vary significantly by country (e.g., Aboagye et al., 2018). The current study investigated similarities and differences between the United States (US) and South Korea (SK) in various aspects of teachers’ psychological well-being, and associations between psychological well-being and teachers’ responsiveness towards children.

The survey data were collected from 1,129 US teachers and 322 SK teachers. Teachers’ responsiveness was measured by five subscales: negative reactions, expressive encouragement, positively-focused reactions, positive social guidance, and negative social guidance (Jeon et al., 2016). Teachers’ psychological well-being was measured by emotion regulation (i.e., emotional reappraisal and suppression; Gross, 1998), job-related emotional exhaustion and competence (Buettner et al., 2016), and perceived personal stress (Cohen et al., 1983). We controlled for teachers’ job satisfaction, disciplinary self-efficacy, years of experience, educational attainment, physical health condition, age, and sex.

The multivariate regression was conducted to examine all independent variables and dependent variables simultaneously using Stata 15.0 (sem). We compared associations of US and SK teachers using the multi-group analysis. The model allowing coefficients, error variances and covariances, and intercepts to vary between countries had the best fit, χ2=76.79, df=34, p<.01; RMSEA=.042; CFI=.098. The missing data were handled using Full Information Maximum Likelihood (FIML) estimation.

Table 1 shows the descriptive statistics by country and the results from the t-tests comparing the means between two countries. We found significant between-country variations in teachers’ psychological well-being and responsiveness toward children. In general, SK teachers reported more challenges with psychological well-being than US teachers. Table 2 presents the regression coefficients of the two countries, and the group differences. Overall, there were strong associations between psychological well-being and responsiveness among both US and SK teachers. Teachers’ reappraisal emotion regulation was significantly associated with positive responsiveness toward children, and suppression emotion regulation had significant relationships with lower negative reactions and higher positive responsiveness (both countries). For SK teachers, job-related emotional exhaustion was positively associated with both positive and negative responsiveness, and emotional competence was associated with lower negative responsiveness. Also, SK teachers with greater personal stress tended to report worse responsiveness toward children. However, US teachers’ job-related emotional exhaustion and competence and stress mostly had no significant associations with responsiveness.

Findings of the study suggest that psychological well-being is a global predictor of teacher practice. Still, there are significant cross-cultural differences in teachers’ psychological experiences and the associations between psychological well-being and teacher responsiveness. Given there is increasing attention given to interventions for ECE teachers’ psychological well-being, interventions are often adopted in various countries. The present findings emphasize the importance of addressing cross-cultural differences in the process, providing culturally sensitive trainings.

Authors

• Sooyeon Byun, University of Virginia - Charlottesville
  Presenting Author

• Xiangyu Zhao, Johns Hopkins University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Lieny Jeon, University of Virginia - Charlottesville
  Non-Presenting Author

• Cynthia K. Buettner, Ohio State University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Shun Ah Chung, Sookmyung Women's University
  Non-Presenting Author