Profession-related support and subjective well-being in a sample of Chinese student teachers: the role of professional identity and trait gratitudexgender

Student teachers have become an increasingly important group in university. Some scholars have begun to study the influencing factors of student teachers' subjective well-being. However, few studies explored the potential positive factors, such as profession-related support, professional identity and gratitude, especially whether and how profession-related support affects student teachers' subjective well-being, and how this relationship varies across trait gratitude and gender. Student teachers' subjective well-being not only concerns their own mental health and personal professional development, but also concerns their future student's academic performance, lifelong learning and development, so they should be given more importance in scholarly research on well-being. Based on the conservation of resource theory, this study examines the relationship between profession-related support from significant others (teachers, parents) and subjective well-being in a sample of Chinese student teachers, and proposes a moderated moderated-mediation model to reveal the mediating (professional identity) and moderating (trait gratitudexgender) effects of this relation. A time-lagged design was used to collect two waves of data (N = 575). Results indicated that both profession-related teacher support and parent support had positive effect on subjective well-being, professional identity mediated this effect, respectively, and profession-related teacher support made slightly greater contribution to subjective well-being than parent support. Meanwhile, trait gratitude moderated the relationship between profession-related teacher support, parent support, and professional identity (two-way interaction), and this moderating effect was further moderated by gender (three-way interaction). Furthermore, trait gratitudexgender moderated the strength of the indirect effect of profession-related teacher support on subjective well-being (through professional identity), and the mediated relationship was stronger for female (versus male) student teachers who have high (versus low) trait gratitude (moderated moderated-mediation). Theoretical and practical implications and future research directions were discussed.