Browsing by Author "Forsius, Maria"

At the time of writing this thesis, in spring and fall 2018, the field of early childhood education in Finland is characterized by turbulence, dissatisfaction and disagreements between the early childhood professionals. Issues such as large child groups, lack of personnel, high rates of sick leave and turnover intentions have been reported in recent national projects as well as in media. The problematic situation is mainly a result of the extensive reform that the Finnish early childhood education has undergone in the last five years, and that has resulted in significant changes on most levels within the field. With this as foundation, and with the Job-Demands Resources model (JD-R) as point of departure, this thesis aimed to investigate how engaged daycare employees in Finland are, to explore the variables related to engagement as well as to analyze if the level of engagement had an impact on the employees’ turnover intentions. Engagement was studied in relation to six variables: workload, emotional demands, work autonomy, relations to colleagues and the supervisor as well as sense of coherence. This thesis was a pilot study in the research project Enjoy your work!, conducted at the Faculty of Educational Sciences at the University of Helsinki. Data was collected in May 2018 with an electronic survey that was sent to the trade unions Talentia, SuPer and the Kindergarten Teachers Union in Finland (LTOL), and then forwarded to a total of N = 3635 daycare employees. In this study, N = 545 of the responses were analyzed. The material was processed and analyzed with the statistical program SPSS. The results showed that the Finnish daycare employees are highly engaged in their work but that a large percentage still had intentions of leaving their job. Four variables explained the engagement: work overload, emotional demands, work autonomy and sense of coherence. The level of engagement differed significantly between those who intended to leave and those who intended to stay, so that those who intended to stay reported higher levels of engagement. However, all employees were highly engaged in their work, even those who intended to leave.