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Prospective Teachers' Tendency of Liking Children and Profession Preference

Love is believed to be the source of many positive emotions in various fields including teaching profession. To put it simply, a teacher who likes children is compassionate, merciful and well intentioned. As a result, the state of teachers’ tendency to like children is considered to be related to their attitudes towards their profession. Therefore, the present study aims at investigating whether there is a relationship between the undergraduate teacher education faculty students’ tendency of liking children and their choosing teaching as a profession. Following the mixed methods approach, the study used questionnaire to collect the participants’ relevant demographic data such as participants’ gender, type of high school they graduated, and the place where they were raised. For this purpose, 224 undergraduate students majoring in teaching were administered the Turkish version of Barnett’s Liking of Children Scale. In addition to quantitative data received from this scale, three open-ended questions were administered to 50 randomly selected participants after the scale administration in a written form. The purpose is to investigate the reasons of their choosing teaching as a profession both in the beginning and at the end of their teacher education. Statistical analysis revealed that female undergraduates’ tendency to liking of children is more effective on choosing teaching as a profession. However, other independent variables were found not to be effective. Results of qualitative analysis showed that, liking children, finding a job easily and the suitability of teaching to their personality were the major reasons to choose this job both at the beginning and at the end of teacher education program. The implications for different fields and groups such as teacher education programs, Ministry of National Education, parents and prospective teachers were also provided in the study.