Investigation of work-family life conflict, emotional intelligence, job satisfaction and work engagement in private pre-school administrators

Purpose of this research is to find out the relations between work-family life conflict, emotional intelligence, job satisfaction and work engagement amongst the administrators of private pre-school. In the research designed according to the explanatory sequential design, which is one of the mixed method designs, the participant selection variant was used, quantitative data were collected first, and then quantitative results were supported by comprehensive qualitative data. Since this research is a mixed method research, under the umbrella of pragmatism, which combines both realism and idealism, the quantitative part was conducted with the functional paradigm and the qualitative part with the hermeneutics/interpretivist paradigm. In the first, quantitative, phase, correlational research design was used. Research universe was comprised of 5,297 private pre-school administrators working in Turkey during 2022-2023 academic year. It was calculated that, 385 administrators working in Turkey would represent this study's quantitative phase sampling, that was identified using stratified sampling which is one of random sampling methods. Quantitative phase data were collected through/with scales of work-family life conflict, emotional intelligence, job satisfaction and work engagement. Quantitative phase data were solved with descirptive and inferential statistics by utilization of SPSS 23 and AMOS 18 software package programs. A descriptive holistic multiple case study design was used for collecting and analyzing the data in the second, qualitative, phase. Study group of this phase was comprised of 12 private pre-school administrators who were within the quantitative part sample and selected through criterion sampling method, one of the voluntary basis purposive sampling methods that is identified with qualitative researches. At the qualitative phase of the research, theme, descriprive and content analyzes of the data that were obtained by directing semi-structured, open-ended questions thorugh in-person or online interviews, were conducted using MAXQDA 2020 software package. According to the quantitative results of the research, amongst the variables studied, the strongest pozitif correlation (r=.541) was observed between job satisfaction and work engagment. It was identified that, work-family life conflict has a negative correlation with optimism and regulation of mood, which is one of the sub-dimensions of emotional intelligence, job satisfaction and work engagement. The weakest correlation among these relationships was the one between work-family life conflict and optimism and regulation of mood. It was assumed that, higher levels of work engagement and job satisfaction of the administrators would reflect positively on their performance which in return would benefit the educational institutions greatly, and increase the quality. Hence, they were evaluated as dependent variables and predictive effect of work-family life conflict and emotional intelligence was studied. In the model obtained, it was found that job satisfaction functioned as a full mediator variable in predicting work-family life conflict in predicting work engagement and optimism and RHD functioned as moderator variables in predicting work-family life conflict in predicting job satisfaction. According to the qualitative results of the research, the administrators frequently expressed the relationship between improvement and job satisfaction, specifically emotional commitment to the work, economical factors and career. It has been determined that, the administrators think that there is a positive correlation between job satisfaction and work engagement, and this plays an important role on the relationship between the economical factors and career and improvement. Key words: Pre-school education, private pre-school administrators, work-family life conflict, emotional intelligence, job satisfaction, work engagement