While systems strive for maintaining quality teachers, equally important is the need for teachers to regard highly of their profession. The push towards more visibleaccountability and regulatory practices related to the teaching profession has not bypassed the Nordic countries either (Imsen & Volckmar, 2014), inevitably affecting how teachers view own profession. Teachers in Sweden indicate lower job satisfaction, compared to their Nordic colleagues (Taajamo, 2016).

              Steadily, teacher self-efficacy (i.e., one’s beliefs of own ability to perform particular tasks concerning teaching at a desired level of quality) has been associated to teachers’ commitment to the profession (Zee & Koomen, 2016) and their overall job satisfaction (Vieluf et al., 2013). This is coupled with a variety of motivational constructs. Richardson and Watt (2016) distinguish between personal utility value (i.e., personal aspects of a teaching career that may hold value in choosing the career) and social utility value (i.e., the utility and future outcomes related to working with children and adolescents). The latter is consistently seen to contribute teachers’ professional engagement and job satisfaction (Torsney et al., 2019).

              Though mentioned associations seem to be well established within the variable-centred research, less is known when observing particular teacher belief-patterns (i.e., person-centred approach) and especially whether these transcend over contexts (e.g., countries). Teaching and learning international survey (TALIS) data provide opportunities for such cross-country comparisons with its rich information about different aspects of the teaching profession and teachers’ related characteristics and practice. In observing whether particular teacher beliefs transcend across contexts we focus on the Nordic countries which while similar in many ways, in recent years are marked  by some distinctive patterns related to teachers and schools (Volckmar & Wibotg, 2014).

              Focus of current research is on determining whether similar belief patterns related to self-efficacy and personal and social utility value about teaching can be extracted among teachers in Finland, Norway, Sweden and Denmark. Furthermore, we examine how these teacher profiles differ related to their perception of job satisfaction, workplace well-being, stress and workload.

In the analyses, TALIS 2018 data from four Nordic countries were used. The full data set for Norway totalled 3802 teachers, 2488 teachers in Sweden, 2761 teachers in Finland and 1853 teachers in Denmark. The following constructs were involved in the analyses: Self-efficacy in classroom management, Self-efficacy in instruction, Self-efficacy in student engagement, Social utility value, Personal utility value, Job satisfaction with work environment, Job satisfaction with profession, Workplace well-being and stress and Workload stress. Principal investigation was performed in Mplus (Muthén & Muthén, 2017) with latent profile analyses (LPA). All missing data were handled using the FIML option. LPA provides us with an opportunity for differentiation between homogeneous, but mutually exclusive, latent groups within a larger heterogeneous population, where each individual, in this case a teacher, is assigned to a single group. Thus, each extracted group represents a unique self-belief profile. The constructs Self-efficacy in instruction, Self-efficacy in student engagement, Social utility value and Personal utility value were included in the LPA. Since LPA included four distinct populations (i.e., Norway, Finland, Denmark and Sweden), multiple-group analyses of similarity in latent profiles solutions proposed by Morin et al. (2016) was used. Initial steps in the process include testing for cross-cultural similarity using configural, structural, dispersion, and distributional similarity of the profiles. The final procedures entail explanatory similarity, allowing us to observe whether the extracted teacher profiles differ related to their perception of job satisfaction with the work environment and profession, as well their perceptions on workplace well-being and stress and workload stress. All models were estimated using 5,000 random start values sets with 100 iterations and the 200 best solutions retained for the final stage of optimisation.

In identifying the number of the teacher profiles, we examined solutions with up to eight profiles separately for each of the four countries, 28 profile solutions in total. The statistical adequacy (e.g., entropy, AIC, BIC, SABIC, LMR indices) indicated solutions with 4 to 6 profiles to be acceptable across the examined countries. Following, a multiple-group model for the 4-profile solution was tested and estimated simultaneously for each country sample with an aim to assess for a cross-national similarity. The first results indicate a configural (LL= -130499.224, AIC= 261216.448, BIC= 262019.106, SABIC= 261672.717, entropy= 0.865), but not structural (LL-131640.853, AIC= 263349.706, BIC= 263600.077, SABIC= 263492.029, entropy= 0.851) similarity. Current analyses are focused on testing partial similarity on a subset of extracted teacher profiles and country pairs, namely Denmark-Sweden and Norway-Finland. While in the first pair teachers’ self-efficacy on student engagement and social utility value (i.e., aspects teachers may value in connection to the teaching profession but from the perspective of the immediate environment and community) produce differences that are more distinctive across the examined profiles, in Norway and Finland these are tied to teachers’ self-efficacy in classroom management. Workplace wellbeing and stress, workload and job satisfaction views are scrutinized further in the light of these results.

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