Research engagement of in-service EFL teachers: Exploring research self-efficacy, personality traits, and critical thinking dispositions

The aim of this cross-sectional mixed-methods descriptive correlational study is to investigate in-service EFL teachers' research engagement and the potential relationship between research engagement (both with and in) and their research self-efficacy, personality traits, and critical thinking dispositions. Participants were purposefully selected from in-service EFL teachers who had taken "Research Methods in Education" courses at Sakarya University and conducted research within the scope of this course. A total of 40 in-service EFL teachers participated in this study. The data for this research was obtained from both quantitative and qualitative data collection tools. Quantitative data were elicited through an adopted questionnaire and three scales: 1) English Language Teachers' Views of Research Questionnaire (Borg, 2009) 2) the Comprehensive Research Self-Efficacy Scale (C-RSES) (Taş et al., 2023), 3) the Big Five Inventory–2 (BFI-2) (Soto and John, 2017), 4) the Marmara Critical Thinking Dispositions Scale (Özgenel and Çetin, 2018). Meanwhile, the qualitative data were collected through open-ended questions developed by the researcher. Findings illustrated that in-service EFL teachers were not frequently research engaged, where their engagement levels varied between rarely and sometimes. The most cited reasons were lack of time and finding published research impractical. Also, some of the participants stated that their job is to teach not to conduct research. Besides, investigating teachers' research engagement, their research self-efficacy levels were also examined. As the findings revealed, teachers feel most self-efficacious in their knowledge of research ethics and processes, discussing findings, reviewing the literature, and formulating the research problem. Upon investigating participants' personality traits, the Agreeableness domain had the highest mean score among all the domains indicating that participants are compassionate, respectful, and have a forgiving nature. Conscientiousness and Open-mindedness also demonstrated relatively high mean scores compared to the other domains. When teachers' critical thinking dispositions were examined, findings demonstrated they exhibited the highest mean scores in reasoning and reaching judgement sub-dimensions. In fact, they reported very high scores almost among all sub-dimensions. Later, to explore the relationship between teachers' research engagement, research self-efficacy, and critical thinking dispositions, a Mann-Whitney U test was conducted. Additionally, a chi-square test was used to examine the relationship between research engagement and personality traits. The results demonstrated that there was no significant relationship between these variables. However, the analysis of the relationship between research self-efficacy and research engagement revealed a single significant difference in the Conceptual/Theoretical Framework factor, where the high engagement group ranked significantly higher than the low engagement group. The study further explored the relationship between teachers' personality traits, research self-efficacy, and critical thinking dispositions. The study found that certain personality traits were positively correlated with both research self-efficacy and critical thinking dispositions. Extraversion, conscientiousness, and open-mindedness showed strong positive relationships with critical thinking dispositions, while extraversion also had a positive connection with research self-efficacy. Negative emotionality was linked to critical thinking dispositions as well, while agreeableness did not show significant correlations with either variable. The study underscored key barriers to teachers' research engagement, such as limited access to resources, time constraints, and perceptions of research as impractical. While this study has important implications for policy changes, institutional support, and professional development initiatives, it also has certain limitations. These limitations may have influenced the depth and generalizability of the findings. Future research could address these limitations by incorporating the suggested approaches. Keywords: Research engagement, Research self-efficacy, Personality traits, Critical thinking dispositions.