Job Perception and the Need for Job Improvement among School Nutrition Teachers in Seoul

Article information

Korean J Community Nutr. 2016;21(1):12-24

Publication date (electronic) : 2016 February 29

doi : https://doi.org/10.5720/kjcn.2016.21.1.12

Seoung-Hee Kim ¹, Kyung-Eun Lee ²

, Jin-Sook Kim ³

¹Shinjeong Elementary School, Seoul, Korea.

²Department of Food and Nutrition, Seoul Women's University, Seoul, Korea.

³Association of School Nutrition Teachers, Korea.

Corresponding author: Kyung-Eun Lee. Department of Food and Nutrition, Seoul Women's University, 621 Hwarang-ro, Nowon-gu, Seoul 01797, Korea. Tel: (02) 970-5648, Fax: (02) 976-4049, klee@swu.ac.kr

Received 2015 October 23; Revised 2016 February 03; Accepted 2016 February 19.

Abstract

Objectives

The objectives of the study were to investigate the school nutrition teachers' perception on their job and to find out recommendations needed for its improvement in order to provide a quality foodservice and nutrition education at schools.

Methods

A total of 219 school nutrition teachers in Seoul were surveyed using self-administered questionnaires.

Results

The perceived importance of the 16 job duties was rated 3.8 based on a 5-point scale (1: very unimportant - 5: very important). The importance of six duties including nutrition management, production management, nutrition education, and food safety management were rated over 4 point but that of record-keeping for documents, official reporting, and service management was rated the lowest. Importance-Performance Analysis showed that nutrition management, receiving/storage management, production management, menu management, food safety management, and equipment/facilities management should be emphasized to maintain the current performance of duties. The performance of the nutrition education and counseling needed to be improved since the importance scores were greater than average but the performance scores were lower than the average. Official reporting and miscellaneous jobs were rated the highest for simplification need. More than half of the respondents agreed that equipment/facilities management, miscellaneous jobs, service staff supervision, and service line supervision could be allocated to other school departments.

Conclusions

School nutrition teachers should invest more time and resources on their core job duties such as nutrition management, production management, food safety management, and nutrition education for providing quality foodservice and nutrition education. To reflect the environmental changes of school foodservice, a reasonable staffing index of school nutrition teachers needs to be developed. In addition, hiring an assistant or implementing school nutrition teacher internship programs can be useful to reduce workloads of the nutrition teachers.

Keywords: job duties; tasks; school nutrition teachers; school foodservice

References

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Article information Continued

This is an Open-Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Fig. 1

Importance-performance analysis of job duties perceived by school nutrition teachers

Fig. 2

Quadratic analysis of perceived importance and need for job simplification by job duty categories

Fig. 3

Quadratic analysis of perceived performance and need for job simplification by job duty categories

Table 1

General characteristics of the respondents

Table 2

Perception of nutrition teachers on importance and performance of tasks in school foodservice

1) A five-point scale was used (1: very unimportant - 5: very important).

2) A five-point scale was used (1: never perform - 5: perform very well).

Table 3

Perception of nutrition teachers on importance of tasks in school foodservice by age and number of students

A five-point scale was used (1: very unimportant - 5: very important).

1) Significant differences were not found by Duncan, Tukey, nor Boferroni post hoc tests.

ab: Different superscripts in the same row mean significant differences by Duncan's post hoc test.

Table 4

Perception of nutrition teachers on performance of tasks in school foodservice by age and number of students

A five-point scale was used (1: never perform - 5: perform very well).

ab: Different superscripts in the same row mean significant differences by Duncan's post hoc test.

Table 5

Perception of nutrition teachers on needs for work simplification and reallocation of tasks

1) A five-point scale was used (1: very unnecessary - 5: very necessary).

2) Frequency (%)