The impact of Family Strengths on Early Childhood Teachers’ on Teacher Efficacy : Examining the Mediating Effects of Resilience and Social Support

The purpose of this study was to investigate the influence between family strenghs and teacher efficacy of infant and toddler teachers working in daycare centers, and to explore ways to increase teacher efficacy by analyzing the relationship between each variable. To this end, 580 infant and toddler teachers working in 43 daycare centers in Seoul-city, Gyeonggi-do, and Incheon were surveyed, and 565 questionnaires were finally analyzed after excluding some questionnaires with biased responses. The data were processed by frequency analysis, reliability test, and correlation analysis, and the causal relationship between variables was analyzed using SPSS (Ver. 27) and AMOS (Ver. 27) programs to identify the influence relationship between each variable. In addition, bootstrapping using phantom variables was conducted to test the mediating effects of resilience and social support on the effect of family strenghs on teacher efficacy of infant and toddler teachers. The results of the study showed that family strenghs of infant and toddler teachers was positively related to teacher efficacy, resilience, and social support, and that family strenghs of infant and toddler teachers had a positive effect on teacher efficacy, resilience, and social support. In addition, family strenghs had a direct effect on teacher efficacy, and resilience and social support had a partial mediating effect. The results of this study suggest that family strenghs of infant and toddler teachers is a variable that affects teacher efficacy, and that teachers need active support to form healthy families through strengthening family relationships.