With the increase of working women, child care centers have expanded rapidly. Despite the numerical growth of institutions, however, their quality of child caring has been evaluated as not meeting parents' expectation. This situation requests research...
With the increase of working women, child care centers have expanded rapidly. Despite the numerical growth of institutions, however, their quality of child caring has been evaluated as not meeting parents' expectation. This situation requests researchers to examine practical solutions to improve child caring quality in the centers. To meet the gap, this study explores early childhood educators' working conditions by the ownership types of institutions (government/public-owned, incorporated foundation-owned, private-owned, and home-based) and the difference of teachers' job satisfaction by the ownership types.
The research questions are as follows:
RQ1: Are there differences in early childhood educator's working conditions by the ownership types of child care centers?
RQ2: Are there differences in the teacher's job satisfaction on the working conditions by the ownership types of child care centers?
The study conducted a survey on the 280 child care centers (70 government/public-owned centers, 70 incorporated foundation-owned centers, 70 private-owned centers and 70 home-based centers). 264 centers returned a completed survey with a 94.3% response rate. However, due to missing values, only 261 cases were used for analysis. SPSS v.14.0 was used to analyze data. Frequency analysis, T-test, and One-Way ANOVA were administerd.
The results are as follows;
Working Conditions by the Ownership Types. 66.1% of the participants answered that the teacher-child ratio of their centers is appropriate. No significant difference was found in regular working hours. Regardless of the ownership, teachers used to work approximately 10 hours during the week. However, on Saturday, teachers at government/public-owned centers have worked for 4 hours while teachers at home-based caring centers have worked for 2 hours. This indicates that early childhood educators suffer from extra hours of work. Salaries are high in the order of government/public-owned, incorporated foundation-owned, private-owned, and home-based centers. Respondents revealed their hopes to have 28% increase of their salaries on average. Legal vacations were found to be abided by 7% of the centers. There were only 30.1% of the respondents answering that they had breaks during the working hours. 72.6% of the respondents answered positively to the question whether their centers have the code of conducts for teachers. 86.4% of the centers were found to offer educational opportunities to their teachers. Regardless of the ownership types, human relationships with the principal, colleagues, parents were found to be as high as 3.1 out of 4 points scale where 1 indicates very poor and 4 very good.
Job Satisfaction on Working Conditions by Ownership Types. T-test was conducted to explore difference in job satisfaction on working conditions by ownership types. The results show that, at .01 significance level, teachers' job satisfaction at government/public-owned and incorporated foundation-owned centers is higher than that at the other types of centers, in such factors as teacher-child ratio, working hours, space to rest, and code of conducts. Compared to other centers, teachers' job satisfaction at private-owned and home-based centers turns out to be higher in the factors of salaries and educational materials, at .01 significance level. On the other hand, the teachers' job satisfaction is generally high in the factor of rest hours.
In a nutshell, the study found that there is significant difference in the factors affecting teachers' job satisfaction by ownership types. However, working conditions were found to be generally poor. The results suggest that working conditions of child care centers need to be improved reflecting teachers' demand as the teachers' job satisfaction affects the quality of child care service directly as well as indirectly.