Bulletin of Educational Research

Abstract

The main purpose of this study is to develop a causal model to describe elementary school teachers’ job satisfaction and how it is affected by such mediating factors as social networks and job characteristics. By comparing the job satisfaction and its influencing factors of teachers who live and work in Taipei Municipality and those of teachers who live and work in Taitung Country, it is expected that more powerful explanations and more exact understandings could be developed. Research participants were selected using the stratified cluster random sampling. Nine hundred and six elementary school teachers from Taipei Municipality and Taitung Country were effective samples. The instrument for the study was the Questionnaire on Elementary School Teacher’s Work and Life Situations, developed by the researcher. In analyzing the research data, factor analysis and multiple regression were used. The study followed the procedure of path analysis to examine the causal mechanism behind the way background variables affect independent variables through the mediation of intervening variables.

Major findings of the study can be summarized below:

In terms of job satisfaction, the data indicates that higher levels of satisfaction are generally found in female teachers, homeroom teachers, teachers who assume directorship in the schools, teachers with lower educational attainment, and teachers with higher income. On the other hand, work locality, ethnic origin, and marital status did not seem to affect teachers’ job satisfaction significantly. However, the overall amount of influence these background variables had on teachers’ job satisfaction was minimal, since the R Square was only .04. Most of these differences became insignificant or decreased after four intervening variables related to job characteristics were added to the formulation. This indicated that the influence the aforementioned background variables had on job satisfaction was exerted through the mediation of these intervening variables. Among them, interpersonal relationship (also as a variable of social networks) and external reward were positively linked to job satisfaction, and work meaninglessness and heaviness of work load were negatively linked to it. At the same time, the R Square took a significant increase to become .31, which indicated that they had significant explaining power. The influence of work locality was not significant, that was canceled out by some positive and negative effect of intervening variables.

Suggestions for government policy, school and teacher practices are also included in the study for further study.

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