Teachers' Attitudes Toward Job Conditions: An Index Created by an Unfolding IRT Model

• Activity Number: 176
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Monday, August 1, 2011 : 10:30 AM to 12:20 PM
• Sponsor: Social Statistics Section
• Author(s): Weiwei Cui*+
• Companies: National Institute of Statistical Sciences
• Keywords: Item Response Theory ; Survey ; Job Satisfaction

Abstract

In the United States, schools chronically experience a shortage of qualified teachers. Ingersoll (2001) argues that this teacher shortage does not come from insufficient numbers of qualified teachers in the general population but rather from higher employee turnover in education than in other professions. Attitudes toward job conditions, such as job satisfaction, are found to be positively related to job performance (Judge, Bono, Thoresen, & Patton, 2001) and negatively associated with employee turnover (Harrison, Newman, & Roth 2006). This study applied the Generalized Graded Unfolding Model, a unidimensional parametric Item Response Theory (IRT) based unfolding model, to the teacher data collected by the Schools and Staff Survey (SASS), sponsored by National Center for Education Statistics. An index of job satisfaction was developed for each teacher in the dataset. This index provides an estimate of teachers' job satisfaction, and can be used to predict teacher turnover.