The Development of the Teacher Emotional Labor Scale (TELS): Validity and Reliability

Abstract

The current study had two main purposes. The first was to develop and validate an instrument to measure emotional labor among teachers (Teacher Emotional Labor Scale, TELS) with an emphasis on the emotion regulation strategies during critical work events. The second was to investigate whether emotional deviance could be considered as one of the emotional labor strategies. The developed 20-item self-report scale's validity and reliability was tested within high school teachers. The sample for this study consisted of 190 high school teachers working at various public schools in Mugla, Turkey (88 females and 102 males). The teachers were employed on a full-time basis and held no administrative position. The average work experience was 17.14 years (SD = 8.80). Confirmatory factor analysis results supported the four dimensional structure of emotional labor separating surface acting, deep acting, automatic emotion regulation, and emotional deviance in the current teacher sample. Results also provided initial evidence for the construct validity, criterion validity and internal consistency of the subscales (ranged from .70 to .81) of TELS.