TEACHER MORALE IN WESTERN STATES AND HAWAII SEVENTH-DAY
According to Vecchio (1991), low job morale (the extent to which employees perceive attaining goals and objectives associated with their job situation as meeting their needs) has been found to be associated with high levels of job absences, tardies, turnover and employee burnout. These same findings generalize to public school teachers (Evans, 1992).
A number of factors have been observed to contribute to variance in teachers' morale levels. In this regard, Raudenbush, Rowan and Kang (1991) report that teacher morale levels have been observed to vary in association with differences in school size and school location as well as in association with differences in teachers' ages, gender, years of schooling, and highest level of education. The problem, however, with these findings is that most of the studies examining teacher morale have not utilized samples of private or parochial school teachers.
Given that private schools provide schooling to over 37 percent of America's young people and that this trend is increasing owing to growing parental dissatisfaction with public schools (Papalia & Olds, 1992), it can be seen that gaining a complete understanding of teacher morale in the private or school is imperative. Clearly what is needed is a study that determines whether the findings of existing research on teacher morale (findings derived from samples of public school teachers) generalize to private school teachers. The proposed study was designed to make this determination.
The proposed study will examine whether teacher morale findings observed using samples of public school teachers generalize to samples of private school teachers. Specifically, the research problem can be defined as an attempt to:
a) determine the levels of teacher morale in selected Seventh-Day Adventist High Schools located in the Western United States and in Hawaii; and b) determine...