The purpose of this study is to examine factors associated with reporting intention and behaviour on child abuse among elementary school teachers in Korea based on the Theory of Planned Behaviour. The Scale, which includes demographics, preparation le...
The purpose of this study is to examine factors associated with reporting intention and behaviour on child abuse among elementary school teachers in Korea based on the Theory of Planned Behaviour. The Scale, which includes demographics, preparation level of training, school characteristics, reporting- related behavior, reporting intention, knowledge, attitudes, subjective norms, and self-efficacy, was used to collect data. A total of 292 teachers provided data.
The result of this study is as follows. First, even though the teachers doubted the child abuse, while 16.3% of them reported, 83.7% of them did not. In terms of teachers’ report intention and knowledge of abuse case, the vignettes of very serious cases were higher than the vignettes of less serious cases. The teachers’ reporting intention of sexual abuse was the highest among the types of child abuse, and it was followed by physical abuse, neglect and emotional abuse. On the other hand, in case of child abuse types, the teachers had the highest degree of knowledge in physical abuse and it was followed by neglect, sexual abuse, and emotional abuse. the teachers’ child abuse-related knowledge was restricted, and the teachers had negative attitudes on reporting child abuse. Moreover, the shortage of teaching staffs’ support and the self-efficacy on making a report was revealed in this study.
Second, among demographics, depends on marital status or parental status, it had different effects on reporting intention and reporting behaviour. The teachers who are single or do not have any children, they had a higher reporting intention, but teachers who are married or have children, made more reports. Meanwhile, teachers who received child abuse training had a higher reporting intention and reported more than who did not. Furthermore, the teachers who recognized the support level of specialist highly had a higher reporting intention and reported more. Besides that, teachers who considered having a frequent discussion about child abuse had more reporting intention. In addition, highly educated or experienced teachers and who recognized the reporting procedure reported more.
Third, knowledge, attitudes, subjective norms, and self-efficacy, all of these gave positive impacts on teachers’ reporting intention, whereas demographics, child abuse training, and school characteristics did not. Meanwhile, self-efficacy, reporting intention, and support level of specialist gave positive impacts on reporting behaviour. Also women or postgraduate teachers had a higher possibility to make a report than men or undergraduate teachers. However, knowledge, attitudes, subjective norms, parental status, teaching experience, child abuse training, reporting procedure, and discussion on child abuse did not influence on reporting behaviour.
The Findings of this study are verified that TPB is effective to predict elementary school teachers’ reporting intention and behaviour. Moreover, the findings suggest that increasing self-efficacy through education and more thorough training about identifying and reporting on child abuse was more important than anything for detecting of abused children at early stage. Furthermore, there is a need to prepare the active supporting specialist for teachers and develop qualitatively increased training program for teachers on child abuse.