Quality of Care Related to Resilience of Nursery School and Kindergarten Teachers

Quality of Care Related to Resilience of Nursery School and Kindergarten Teachers Toshio OHARA and Yasuko MUTO* Tokyo School of Education, Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo 161-0033 * Faculty of Education and Human Sciences, Yokohama National University, Yokohama 240-8501 The first objective of this study is to construct a resilience scale of nursery school and kindergarten teachers. The second objective is to declare a relation between the pre-school teacher efficacy and the resilience of nursery schools and kindergartens. The responses to our questionnaire were sent in from 183 kindergarten teachers and 190 nursery school teachers. Out of the items contained in the resilience scale, three factors were obtained by factor analysis; they are "feeling of satisfaction from care," "positive role-adaptation" and "professional skill of care and education." The internal consistency reliability was determined with Cronbach's alpha coefficient. 3 factors mentioned above contained the personal trait on the part of teachers and the environment of child care and education. Next, the cluster analysis was made on the resilience scale scores with a view to declaring declaring a relation between the resilience and the efficacy. As a result, the nursery school and kindergarten teachers were divided into 4 groups. The group that scored high marks on all the items of the resilience scale showed the pre-school teacher efficacy that was significantly higher than that of the other groups. (Received November 6, 2004; Accepted in revised form July 25, 2005)