Factors Influencing Teachers Attrition in the United Arab Emirates

Factors Influencing Teacher AttritionIn the United Arab EmiratesAli S. Al Kaabi, PhDUniversity of Pittsburgh, 2005The purpose of this study was to examine the factors associated with high attrition rate among the UAE citizen teachers who teach in public schools grades 1-12. The factors that this study investigated are: personal factors, economic factors, teacher preparation, employment factors, and social-cultural factors. The study was guided by five research questions. Data for this study was collected through two methods: a survey questionnaire that was sent to the sample of this study was 594 UAE citizen teachers in the public schools, and a constructed interview with five educational zone directors. To analyze the quantitative data descriptive statistics (means, percentage, and standard deviations), and Chi-Square Test were applied to examine the relation between the most important factors and teachers gender, qualifications, and years of experience. Qualitative analysis was applied to interpret the data obtained from the interviews with five educational zone directors and open-ended questions from the last part of the questionnaire.The result of this study indicated that the most important factors associated with teacher attrition are: (a) The personal factors that have the highest effect on teacher attrition are "stress" with mean (3.31), and "accountability" with mean (3.19). (b) The economic factor that has the highest effect on teacher attrition is "incentives" with mean (3.23). (c) The employment factor that has the highest effect on teacher attrition is "paperwork" with mean (3.07). (d) The social-cultural factor that has the highest effect on teacher attrition is "social appreciation" with mean (3.07). The result indicated that teacher preparation factors are the least important factors associated with teacher attrition with a very low mean (2.10)