engleski

Personal and professional well-being among Croatian early childhood teachers: Are they related?

Early childhood teachers’ work satisfaction is an essential prerequisite to their work attainments and quality work outcomes. At the same time, besides their professional well- being, their personal well-being is of utmost importance, what raises the question about the nature of their relatedness. Therefore, this study was aimed to explore the personal and professional well-being among Croatian early childhood teachers. Personal well-being is operationalized by an early childhood teachers’ optimism, positive emotions, flow and life satisfaction, and their professional well-being is measured by their work satisfaction. Acquired data should result in practical implications for educators' work improvement from the aspect of positive psychology at the workplace. A total of 179 early childhood teachers from the Kindergarten “Rijeka“, averaged age of 43 years and averaged 20 years of service, have participated in this research. Regarding the professional well-being, results showed that early education teachers were moderately satisfied with their work. Similarly, results about their personal well- being demonstrated moderate to high levels of optimism, positive emotions, flow and life satisfaction. Correlation analyses revealed significant positive relationship between high levels of all personal well-being dimensions and high level of work satisfaction. Additionally, it was determined that older and highly experienced early childhood teachers are significantly less satisfied with work and less optimistic. With that, this study points out the importance of research in the field of and early and pre- school education and contributes to improving the profession of educational staff. Expanding the scientific knowledge to early education teachers about their professional and personal well-being, and exploring and taking into account the empirical evidence as the basis for quality work, work achievements and quality of work outcomes in the field of an early and pre- school education could be improved.

Early education teachers ; Flow ; Optimism ; Positive emotions ; Life and work satisfaction

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