Adverse childhood experiences: Awareness and intervention strategies of preschool teachers, educational administrators and support staff

The aim of this study is to analyze the perceptions of efficacy of teachers, education administrators and support personnel working in early childhood education institutions regarding their awareness of adverse childhood experiences and their preferred intervention strategies. The study was designed in the relational survey model, one of the quantitative research methods. The Participants of the study consisted of a total of 141 people, 23 administrators, 78 preschool teachers and 40 support personnel, identified through maximum diversity sampling approach, one of the purposive sampling methods, working in public kindergartens in the city center of Adıyaman. As data collection tools in this research; Teacher Efficacy Scale, Adverse Childhood Experiences Detection Efficiency, Potential Interventions in Childhood Experiences Questionnaire and Personal Information Form were used. After normality tests, validity and reliability analyzes, descriptive analyzes, Kruskal Wallis-H test and correlation analyzes were performed to reach the findings. It was found that the teachers considered themselves partially sufficient in detecting the possible adverse childhood experiences (ACE) of the children in their classes. It has been determined that while education administrators consider themselves sufficient in detecting adverse childhood experiences (ACE), support personnel consider themselves inadequate in this regard. According to the Kruskal Wallis-H test, it was observed that there was a statistically significant difference among teachers, education administrators and support personnel in terms of their ability to detect adverse childhood experiences and family dysfunctions, emotional-physical neglect and abuse. It was determined that there was no significant difference among the groups in terms of sexual abuse detection adequacy. Another aim of this study is to reveal what kind of intervention strategy the personnel working in early childhood education institutions will follow if they realize their adverse childhood experiences. It has been seen that if education staff detect adverse childhood experiences, they will intervene mainly by directing them to the school guidance service, but at the point of notification, they will mostly prefer to notify the school principal while reporting to the prosecutor's office is the least preferred intervention strategy. Finally, it is known that professional self-afficacy is defined as having the ability to cope with the difficulties related to his professional role, developing his academic skills related to his profession, being open to change, cognitively and being in harmony with his environment socially. The relationship between teachers' professional self-efficacy and their ability to detect adverse childhood experiences was examined and it was found that there was a positive and significant relationship between the two variables. It is noteworthy that teachers who perceive themselves as more competent in terms of professionalism consider themselves sufficient in terms of detecting adverse childhood experiences. It has been revealed that teachers with high professional competence are more confident in detecting family dysfunctions, emotional and physical neglect and abuse. Keywords; Adverse childhood experiences, awareness of adverse childhood experiences, intervention strategies of adverse childhood experiences, early childhood education, early childhood period