The purpose of this study was to investigate the role of rumination and reflection in teachers' classroom stress and burnout, thereby assessing their predictive value per se and their role as moderators between teacher reported job characteristics and stress and burnout. 439 elementary school teachers participated in the study. Dispositional characteristics explained additional variance in teachers' stress and burnout beyond job characteristics. Rumination was a significant predictor of both stress and burnout, whereas reflection was not. However, reflection moderated the relation between job characteristics and stress. These results highlight the importance of simultaneously investigating environmental and dispositional characteristics of teachers' strain.
COBISS.SI-ID: 21087240
Incremental predictive value of 5 broad and 13 narrow personality traits for academic achievement over and beyond age, gender, parental education, and country was examined in Russian and Slovene 8- to 15-year-olds. Personality data were collected from mothers (Russia: N = 994, Slovenia: N = 624) and adolescents (Russia: N = 481, Slovenia: N = 310) using the Inventory of Child Individual Differences-Short. Final grades in mathematics and Russian/Slovene language were considered as measures of academic success. The broad and the narrow traits predicted the grades, improving the criteria variance by 11% to 14% and 15% to 19%, respectively, over the background variables. Across the countries, informants and school subjects, younger age, higher parental education, female gender, openness (especially subjectively perceived intelligence), and low extraversion predicted academic achievements. Mother-assessed conscientiousness (especially low distractibility) was also predictive of school grades.
COBISS.SI-ID: 57806690
This study examines the effect of certain socio-cultural factors of the family environment on the language of toddlers and children in early childhood. The sample included 86 families with one- to six-year-old children. The data on the social, economic, and cultural factors of the family environment, parental reading literacy, parental knowledge of childrenʼs development, childrenʼs exposure to shared reading, and child language were obtained in the family environment. Path analysis was used to verify the presumed structural model, which included social and economic factors of the family environment, parental knowledge of childrenʼs development, and parental reading literacy as independent variables, activities used by parents to encourage their childʼs language as mediating variables, and childrenʼs early literacy and language as a dependent variable. The analysis results showed that the presumed structural modelfitted our data well. Parental education (PE), family financial conditions, parental knowledge of childrenʼs development, and parental reading literacy was able to explain 13% of the variance in child language. The obtained results confirm the significant effect of social, economic, and cultural factors of the childʼs family on language during toddlerhood and early childhood
COBISS.SI-ID: 56853346
The purpose of this study was to examine the reliability and validity of the School Anxiety Inventory (SAI) using a sample of 646 Slovenian adolescents (48% boys), ranging in age from 12 to 19 years. Single confirmatory factor analyses replicated the correlated four-factor structure of scores on the SAI for anxiety-provoking school situations (Anxiety about School Failure and Punishment, Anxiety about Aggression, Anxiety about Social Evaluation, and Anxiety about Academic Evaluation), and the three-factor structure of the anxiety response systems (Physiological Anxiety, Cognitive Anxiety, and Behavioral Anxiety). Equality of factor structures was compared using multigroup confirmatory factor analyses. Measurement invariance for the four- and threefactor models was obtained across gender and school-level samples. The scores of the instrument showed high internal reliability and adequate test%retest reliability. The concurrent validity of the SAI scores was also examined through its relationship with the Social Anxiety Scale for Adolescents (SASA) scores and the Questionnaire about Interpersonal Difficulties for Adolescents (QIDA) scores. Correlations of the SAI scores with scores on the SASA and the QIDA were of low to moderate effect sizes.
COBISS.SI-ID: 58437730
Four individual profiles of ways toward happiness were found on a Slovene sample: Full, Empty, Pleasurable, and Meaningful life types. The present study aimed to validate these four types in samples from seven different countries (N = 3690) utilising four different languages. Participants completed the Orientation towards Happiness Scale and measures of hedonic and eudaimonic well-being, and ill-being. A two-step cluster analysis was performed with each of the seven country samples. A highly congruent, highly internally replicable four-cluster solution was found in all seven samples. Full and Empty life individuals have high and low scores on all three orientations to happiness, respectively. Pleasurable and Meaningful types reflect two traditional philosophic orientations: Pleasurable life individuals scored high on pleasure, average on engagement and low on meaning orientation, while Meaningful life individuals had high scores on meaning, average on engagement, and low scores on pleasure orientation. The four types differed in subjective happiness and psychological well-being with full life type characterized by the highest scores on subjective happiness and psychological well-being, and Empty life by the lowest scores. On the other hand, depressive symptoms were likely to be the lowest in the Full life type and the highest in the Empty life type. Meaningful and Pleasurable life types were characterized by moderate well- and ill-being, but the two types tended not to differ from each other on the measures used.
COBISS.SI-ID: 57814114