Browsing by Author "Partanen, Hanna"

This thesis approaches the work of school assistants in a multi-professional work community by examining how the school assistants feel they are part of the school´s work community. On the basis of previous research, it has been found that the feeling of belonging is strengthened when a person feels that their basic psychological needs, i.e., autonomy, competence and relatedness have been met. The feeling of belonging and basic psychological needs increase the school assistants job satisfaction. A motivated and satisfied school assistant enjoys their job better, which also reduces the prevailing turnover rate. The theories of basic psychological needs, sense of belonging and job satisfaction is used as background theories. The research material was collected by using an electronic questionnaire that was published in a closed Facebook group for school assistants in October 2022. 404 school assistants responded to the survey. The SPSS Statistics 27 program was used to analyse the quantitative data. The school assistants’ sense of belonging, the fulfilment of basic psychological needs and the level of job satisfaction were examined with indicators and the differences between variables in relation to different background variables with one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) and t-test. Connections between variables were examined using Pearson correlation coefficient. In which ways basic psychological needs explained the school assistants’ sense of belonging was determined by means of a linear regression analysis. Most school assistants felt that they belonged to their work community well, that their basic psychological needs were also met well, and they felt that they were satisfied with their work. A closer examination of external job satisfaction showed that especially the ratio of salary and workload caused low satisfaction. The sense of belonging was quite strongly connected with autonomy and relatedness and moderately connected with competence. The material showed that the group most dissatisfied with their work was found in the 30–39-year-olds who had worked as assistants for 6–10 years. The same group also experienced the strongest feelings of not belonging. Among the areas of basic needs, the fulfilment of autonomy explained more strongly job satisfaction while relatedness explained belonging. With the help of these results, more attention should be paid to the formation of school assistants’ sense of belonging by accepting school assistants as equal members of the works community in all schools in Finland.