ISSN 0439-755X
CN 11-1911/B

Acta Psychologica Sinica ›› 2021, Vol. 53 ›› Issue (8): 875-889.doi: 10.3724/SP.J.1041.2021.00875

• Reports of Empirical Studies • Previous Articles     Next Articles

Changes of teachers’ subjective well-being in mainland China (2002~2019): The perspective of cross-temporal meta-analysis

XIN Sufei, LIANG Xin, SHENG Liang(), ZHAO Zhirui   

  1. School of Educational Sciences, Ludong University, Yantai 264025, China
  • Received:2020-11-27 Published:2021-08-25 Online:2021-06-25
  • Contact: SHENG Liang E-mail:shengliang@ldu.edu.cn
  • Supported by:
    youth program of National Social Science Foundation of China(20CSH070)

Abstract:

As a key index to measure the mental health of teachers, teachers’ subjective well-being is very important to the investigation and analysis of their current situation, and it cannot be neglected to monitor the trend of its dynamic change with the social change and its relationship with the social change. This study conducted a cross-temporal meta-analysis of 51 reports measuring teachers’ subjective well-being (SWB) from 2002 to 2019, including 13,600 teachers. The findings are as follows: (1) the average scores of subjective well-being of teachers is negatively correlated with the year, which indicates that the subjective well-being of teachers in China is decreasing year by year. (2) the changes of eight macro-social indicators from three aspects of social economic conditions (consumption level, housing price, old-age dependency ratio and education funds), social connection (family size, divorce rate and urbanization level) and social threat (crime rate) can significantly predict the decline of teachers’ subjective well-being. (3) the subjective well-being of primary and middle school teachers has a tendency to decrease with the year, and the scores of subjective well-being are lower than those of college teachers. This study not only explores the changing trend of teachers’ subjective well-being in China in the past 20 years, but also puts forward a three-dimensional theoretical framework that influences teachers’ subjective well-being in China. This paper extends the research ideas of group social psychology vertically (with the changes of the times) and horizontally (macroscopical social index), expanding the theoretical basis, and in practice, providing the decision-making basis for intervening and regulating the subjective well-being level of teachers in our country.

Key words: teachers, subjective well-being, the General Wellbeing Schedule, social change, cross-temporal meta-analysis, meta- analysis