Distance Education and Teachers’ Job Satisfaction during the COVID-19 Pandemic: The Mediating Role of Work-Family Conflict

Ayhan Görmüş; Meryem Baytur

doi:10.16986/hunefd.1706023

Research Article

COVID-19 Pandemisi Sürecinde Uzaktan Eğitim ve Öğretmenlerin İş Tatmini: İş-Aile Çatışmasının Aracı Rolü

Year 2026, Volume: 41 Issue: 2 , 285 - 300 , 30.04.2026

Ayhan Görmüş , Meryem Baytur

https://doi.org/10.16986/hunefd.1706023

https://izlik.org/JA84WN26MS

Abstract

Conventional school education mandatorily switched to distance education to sustain education and protect the health of students and teachers during the COVID-19 lockdown around the world. However, mandatory distance education, a sort of home-based telework, is highly likely to get more blurred the borders devoted to working and family domains and trigger the work-family conflicts experienced by teachers and reduce their job satisfaction. Although previous studies addressed the relationships between distance education and job satisfaction, there is a limited study on the effect of the COVID-19 lockdown on the relationship between these three variables. The current study aims to explore the mediating role of work-family conflict in the association between distance education and teachers’ job satisfaction by using data collected from Turkish teachers working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic. The results found that although mandatory distance education increased their job satisfaction since it allows them to maintain teaching activities under the COVID-19 circumstances, work-family conflict negatively mediated the link between mandatory distance education and teachers’ job satisfaction.

Keywords

Distance education , teachers , job satisfaction , work-family conflict , the Covid-19 pandemic

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