The Attitudes of Primary School Teachers towards Leisure

Abstract

This study aims to analyze the attitudes of primary school teachers towards leisure. It also aims to determine whether the attitudes of primary school teachers vary according to their gender and leisure activities they attend. A total of 355 primary school teachers ( X age = 45.08±7.91), including 188 females and 167 males, volunteered to participate in this study. "Leisure Attitude Scale" developed by Beard and Ragheb (1982) and adapted into Turkish by Akgül and Gürbüz (2010) and "General Information Form" were utilized to collect data. The findings of this study indicates that the leisure attitudes levels of teachers were quite high ( X mean = 4.28±.33). Also according to gender of the participants, a significant difference was found in favor of the female teachers in regards to the attitude of leisure in the cognitive sub-dimension and in total points but not in the affective and behavioral sub-dimensions. In terms of the most preferred leisure activity, there was a significant difference in the behavioral sub-dimension of the leisure attitude scale of teachers, whereas there was no statistically significant difference in the cognitive, affective sub-dimensions and total scores. Accordingly, teachers who preferred physical activities in leisure had higher points than the ones who preferred other activities with regards to the behavioral sub-dimensional. In addition, no significant relationship was found between the ages of the teachers, the years of professional service, the leisure attitude scale sub-dimensions and total score.