Demographic Factors and Life Satisfaction of Indonesian Christian Private Universities Lecturers

Abstract

Life satisfaction plays an important role to improve the quality of an individual’s work performance in any profession, including lecturers in a higher education institution. As educators, lecturers are obliged to implement “Tridharma Perguruan Tinggi” properly and responsibly. This research is a descriptive preliminary study to analyze the relation of demographic factors with lecturer’s life satisfaction of Christian private universities in Indonesia. Using SWLS (Satisfaction with Life Scale), this research used 60 respondents from several Christian private universities. This research found that most of the lecturers (43.3%) were satisfied with their life condition right now. Furthermore, based on cross tabulation analysis, it is known that the difference of demographic factors among the respondents has each unique pattern on the lecturer's life satisfaction. Further findings with Kendall’s tau and V’ Crammers coefficient show that demographic factors, namely age, income, number of co-workers, marital status, spouse’s status, and health conditions have a significant correlation and association with the lecturer’s life satisfaction. In particular, with ordinal logistic regression, we found that age, income, and spouse’s status have significant effect towards life satisfaction. Suggestions were addressed to University Leaders to improve life satisfaction and subjective wellbeing of their lecturers through some psychological interventions and employee’s development program