The purpose of this study is to analyze the structural relationship between the safety climate, the safety consciousness, the safety attitude, and the safety behavior perceived by the early childhood teachers.
As the safety accident is linked directly with the life, it’s required to pay full attention to prevent but the society has been never free from the safety accident. There is no exception for preschool educational institution. The most effective way to prevent the safety accident is probably safety education for early childhood teachers. Although different academic world and circles have explored variables that affect worker’s safety behavior to seek solutions to improve safety behavior, the early childhood education field where should treat safety issue seriously just examines recognition without discovering different variables that affect safety behavior of early childhood teachers who should be the most wary of children’s safety issue. As the purpose of this study is to examine the influence of safety climate, safety consciousness and safety attitude that manifests in the organizational characteristics of preschool educational institution on the safety behavior of early childhood teachers. It’s expected to provide base data for teacher education program to improve the early childhood teacher’s safety consciousness and behavior and formulate policy in the children’s safety issue. The research problems are as follows to achieve the purpose of this study.
Question 1. Is there any difference in the early childhood teacher’s perception on the safety climate, safety consciousness, safety attitude and safety behavior depending on their general background?
Question 2. How’s the structural relationship among the safety climate, safety consciousness, safety attitude and safety behavior in which the early childhood teachers perceive?
The research was conducted on 300 early childhood teachers who agreed to participate in the research, working in the kindergartens located in Busan Metropolitan City and Gyeongsangnam-do Province for 1 month on Jan. 2019. Also, SPSS 23.0 and AMOS 23.0 Program were used to process and analyze data. In order to find out the difference among the safety climate, safety consciousness, safety attitude and safety behavior in the organization perceived by the early childhood teachers, one-way ANOVA and Scheffe test for post-hoc test were carried out in succession to verify the difference. To verify relationship between research variables, the data was analyzed with Person’s correlation coefficients and also, a structural equation modelling (SEM; Hoyle & Smith, 1994) and hierarchical x2 verification (Holmbeck, 1997) were carried out with Amos 23.0 in order to test mediated effect of safety consciousness and safety attitude in the relationship between the safety climate and safety behavior. In addition, Bootstrap verification was conducted to examine statistical significance in the mediated effect.
The research findings showed that there was difference in the safety climate, safety consciousness, safety attitude and safety behavior depending on mostly age, career, form of organization and academic background and moreover, it was higher especially when the age of teachers were higher with long career and relatively higher level of education and also, they worked in public kindergartens. There was statistically significant difference in the safety climate, safety consciousness, safety attitude and safety behavior depending on the general background of early childhood teachers and the similarity of general background in each element indicated that it’s necessary to take proper measures by each element to raise standard of the safety climate, safety consciousness, safety attitude and safety behavior.
The correlation analysis results of research variables showed that the safety consciousness had high positive relationship with the early childhood teacher’s safety behavior while the safety climate and safety attitude had relatively high positive relationship with the early childhood teacher’s safety behavior, too. Based on these results, the verification results of the structural relationship discovered that organization’s safety climate perceived by the early childhood teachers had statistically significant influence on the early childhood teacher’s safety consciousness and safety attitude and moreover, both early childhood teacher’s safety consciousness and safety attitude had statistically significant impact on safety behavior. Furthermore, the direct effect of organization’s safety climate perceived by the early childhood teachers was not statistically significant but indirect effect had statistically significant impact. Since the final research model in this study was complete mediation model, the total effect of safety climate on safety behavior had statistically significant impact.
To summarize, the early childhood teacher’s safety perception and safety attitude affect safety behavior and furthermore, the organization’s safety climate perceived by the early childhood teachers had influence as the complete mediation model through the safety perception and safety attitude.
Thus, it’s difficult to distinguish the early childhood teacher’s safety climate, safety consciousness, safety attitude and safety behavior in the preschool educational institution and all such elements could prevent safety accident or influence to do so in the preschool educational institution. Therefore, the early childhood teacher’s safety climate, safety consciousness, safety attitude and safety behavior should be emphasized and the society should take the lead to help early childhood teachers develop their knowledge, attitude and skills related with the safety issues and behave safely so as to maintain secure life in their ordinary lives.