INVESTIGATION OF TEACHERS’ RESILIENCE CAPACITY BY DEMOGRAPHICS

Abstract

This study investigated the professional resilience levels of teachers and compared it by some demographics. To this end, in the first stage of the study, “Employee Resilience Scale” was adapted to Turkish culture in the context of educational organizations and named as “Teachers’ Professional Resiliency Scale”. The findings indicated that the scale had adequate psychometric properties for Turkish teacher sample (n=165). In the second stage of the study, the scale was administered to 202 teachers online. The study employed convenient sampling method. The data were collected between the 10th and 21st of February 2021. To reveal teachers’ resilience level minimum, maximum, arithmetic mean, and standard deviations were calculated. To conduct comparisons by demographics (gender, educational level, experience, and grade level) t-test and Kruskall Wallis-H tests were used. The findings showed that the resilience levels of the teachers were “Often”. While gender and educational level did not create a statistically significant difference, experience and school level did. Teachers with an experience of 0-5 years had a higher level of resilience than their colleagues with an experience between 6-20 years. On the other hand, pre-school and secondary school teachers had a higher level of resilience than high school teachers. The findings were discussed based on the previous literature and some suggestions were presented.