The contribution of positive psychology constructs in the retention of secondary school teachers in England

SPSS data file of the survey responses to accompany published paper, and from Andrew Chitty's UON doctoral thesis.

A sample of 279 secondary schoolteachers completed an online survey.

Information about years of service, positions of responsibility gained, type of school, gender and age were requested.

Hope was measured using the Trait Hope Scale (Snyder et al., 1991), a 12-item adult measure. Four items measure pathways, four measure agency and the remainder are distractors. Responses are rated on an 8-point scale where 1 is ‘completely false’ and 8 is ‘completely true’.

Self-efficacy was measured using the 8-item New General Self-Efficacy Scale (NGSE) (Chen, Gully, and Eden, 2001), rated on an 8-point scale from ‘strongly agree’ to ‘strongly disagree’.
Teachers’ levels of Optimism were operationalised using the Revised Life Orientation Test (LOT-R) (Scheier, Carver, and Bridges, 1994), rated on a 5-point scale from ‘strongly disagree’ to ‘strongly agree’.

Mindset was measured on a scale adapted from Dweck’s Theories of Intelligence Scale, Self-Form for Adults (Dweck, 1999; De Castella and Byrne, 2015). Three items were used. Responses were recorded on a 5-point scale from ‘strongly disagree’ (1) to ‘strongly agree’ (5).

The three Job crafting work orientations (WO), ‘job’, ‘career’ and ‘calling’ were measured using 8 items by Leanna, Appelbaum and Sherchuk (2009) (adapted from Wrzesniewski et al. 1997). Responses ranged from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree).

Resilience was measured using the 10-item Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale (CD-RISC). Responses are scored on a 5-point scale from 1= ‘not true at all’ to 5= ‘true all of the time’.

The Positive Emotion, Engagement, Meaning and Accomplishment (PERMA) (Seligman, 2011) construct was measured with the PERMA Profiler (Butler and Kern, 2016), a 23-item measure that assesses wellbeing across the five PERMA domains. Items are scored on a 10-point scale from ‘Never’ (0) to ‘Always’ (10).

Intention to stay or leave the teaching profession (operationalised as Intention to Quit) was assessed by adapting three items used by Knudsen, Rusharme and Roman (2006) (originating from Walsh, Ashford and Hill, 1985) where 1 = ‘strongly disagree’ and 7 = ‘strongly agree’.

Due to ethical/commercial issues, the contents of this dataset cannot be made openly available.