Profiles of attitudes toward inclusive education among Chinese in-service teachers: their relationships with demographic factors and organizational commitment

Introduction: The increased diversity of students (e.g., students with special
educational needs) has presented teachers with unprecedented challenges.
Teachers’ attitudes toward inclusive education play a crucial role in teachers’
organizational well-being. However, existing studies mostly explored attitudes
toward inclusive education based on a variable-centered approach. This
study used a person-centered approach to identify teachers’ attitude profile
membership and explored the relationships of attitude profiles with demographic factors (i.e., gender, years of teaching experience, subject taught, and in-service training) and organizational commitment.

Methods: Nine hundred and seventy-two in-service teachers from forty-nine
inclusive education schools in Beijing responded to the Revised Multidimensional Attitudes toward Inclusive Education Scale and the Organizational Commitment Inventory. Latent profile analyses, multinomial logistic regression, and univariateanalysis of variance were used to analyze data.

Results and discussion: The results revealed four attitude profiles: involuntary
participation, behavior avoidance, neutral, and proactive involvement. Years
of teaching experience and in-service training were significant predictors of
teachers’ latent profile membership. Teachers belonging to the involuntary
participation profile showed the highest levels of maladaptive commitments to
inclusive education schools. Teachers belonging to the proactive involvement
and the behavior avoidance profiles showed higher levels of adaptive
commitments. However, teachers belonging to the neutral profile had the
lowest levels of adaptive commitments. The theoretical contributions, practical
implications, and limitations are discussed.