School Happiness: A Scale Development and Implementation Study

Abstract

Purpose: This research aimed to determine schoolhappiness level of the teachers based on their opinions. For this purpose, ‘School Happiness Scale’ was developed by the researchers. The validity and reliability of the School Happiness Scale were tested. And then, the scale was applied to 484 teachers to determine their school happiness level. Research Method: In the study, a quantitative research design was employed during the data collection and the analysis phases.Results: The School Happiness Scale consists of 26items and five sub-factors. The item-total correlationsrange from .54 to .86. The five factors explain 65.09%of the total variance. The results showed that teachersperceived moderate level of school happiness in some sub-dimensions such as ‘physicalequipment’, and ‘activities’. They also perceived high level of school happiness in‘collaboration’, and ‘school management’ sub-themes. The scores varied according to theschool type and teaching field variables.Implications for Research and Practice: The results revealed that the school principals shouldencourage teachers, and display democratic and fair school management attitudes to increaseschool happiness. The top managers can elaborate to enhance the physical conditions of theschools. In order to increase school happiness of teachers, the collaboration can be improvedamong the members of school community. School Happiness Scale can be applied to differentparticipants, and so the school happiness levels of the teachers as well as the validity andreliability scores of scale can be measured.