Examination of pre-school teachers' recognition of child negligence and abuse in terms of demographic variables

This research was carried out to examine preschool teachers' recognition of child neglect and abuse in terms of demographic variables. In the study, the status of pre-school teachers' recognition of child neglect and abuse, the gender, age, marital status of the teachers, whether they have children, their professional seniority, whether they received in-service training on neglect and abuse, whether they took courses on child neglect and abuse in their undergraduate education were determined. It was examined whether it changed according to the scores they received from the scale. The research is a study in the general scanning model design, and its sample consists of 341 preschool teachers working in independent kindergartens and kindergartens in Meram, Selçuklu and Karatay districts of Konya city center in the 2020-2021 academic year. Çırak Karadağ, Sönmez, and Dereobalı (2014) in order to reveal the possible signs of child neglect and abuse of preschool teachers , and the demographic information of the teachers were obtained through the personal information form prepared by the researcher. has been collected. In the analysis of the data obtained, IBM SPSS 26.0 ( IBM Corp. , 2019 ) program was used. While analyzing the findings, frequencies and percentages were calculated to determine their demographic information. Since the normal distribution assumption of the variables was not met, Mann - Whitney U-Test was used for paired group comparisons , and one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) tests were used in groups where the normal distribution assumption of the variables was met. As a result of the research, it was found that there was no significant difference between preschool teachers' recognition of child neglect and abuse in terms of gender, marital status, having children, number of children, and professional seniority. In addition, it is among the research findings that the status of recognizing child neglect and abuse differs according to the variables of teachers' age, whether they have received in-service training on neglect and abuse, whether they have taken courses during their undergraduate education, and that teachers' recognition of neglect and abuse is high as a result of the scores they get from the scale.