String Music Educators’ Job Satisfaction: Underlying Structures and Relationships with Various Factors

Abstract

The purposes of this paper were to explore the factors that are fundamental to the overall job satisfaction of string music educators and explore possible relationships between various factors and job satisfaction. Two-hundred and Thirty-eight members of the American String Teachers Association who indicated that their primary occupation was teaching strings in a K-12 setting responded to a 44 item questionnaire designed to elicit demographic data and levels of satisfaction with multiple aspects of their teaching position. In order to examine the underlying structures of the job satisfaction of string music educators, a factor analysis was conducted on each of the satisfaction variables included in the questionnaire. Results from this study suggest that there are five major components underlying string teacher job satisfaction – professional climate, student quality, interpersonal relationships, teaching responsibilities, and external career factors. Factors found to be significantly related to job satisfaction included number of students with special needs, number of minority students, commitment to teaching, and occupational identity.