Gender differences in character strengths and virtues of teachers in higher education

Pages:312-317
Sushila Pareek and Nirmala Singh Rathore (Department of Psychology, University of Rajasthan, Jaipur, Rajasthan)

Education in general and higher education in particular play an important role in facilitating technological, social and human resource development. Quality in education is generally applied to signify the positive and considerable inputs from teachers and students. In this regard, positive education program (Seligman et al., 2009) has been discovered which comprises the key elements viz., character strengths and virtues, resilience, happiness, interpersonal relationships for consistent well-being and success. In accordance with the concept, the present piece of work aimed at studying character strengths and virtues of teachers in higher education. The institutional case study approach was undertaken for profiling the character strengths and virtues of teachers. The sample for the present study was taken from Maharishi Arvind College of Engineering and Research Centre, Sirsi Road, Jaipur on the purposive sampling basis. The Values in Action Inventory of Strengths (VIA-IS) (Peterson et al., 2006), was administered to 60 faculty members (20 female and 40 male). The results pointed out that the mean score of male and female teachers on character strengths and virtues was found to be significantly different and female teachers scored higher mean than their male counter parts. The significant positive relationship between the rank order of female and male teachers indicated the similar pattern of character strengths and virtues.