Philosophical Preferences of Faculty Members in Saudi Universities and Their Relationship to Their Professional Roles

This study aimed to investigate the educational philosophical preferences of faculty members in Saudi universities and their relationship to the performance of their professional roles. To meet such an end, the researchers employed a descriptive approach, using a questionnaire to assess the educational philosophical preferences of Saudi university faculty members and their actual performance in professional roles. The questionnaire was administered to a stratified random sample of 402 faculty members from Saudi universities. The analysis of the collected data led to several key findings, including the following:

Regarding the educational philosophical preferences of faculty members, Islamic educational philosophy ranked first, followed by logical positivism in second place. Pragmatism came in third, realism in fourth, and idealism in fifth and last place.
Regarding the actual performance of professional roles, the results indicated that faculty members in Saudi universities performed their roles to a high degree across various dimensions, including teaching, research, and community service. The ranking of these dimensions from highest to lowest was: teaching, research, and community service.
Regarding the nature of the relationship between the two variables, the results revealed statistically significant positive correlations at a significance level of 0.01 between the educational philosophical preferences of faculty members in Saudi universities and their performance of professional roles. Upon examining the correlation coefficients and coefficients of determination, the strongest correlations were found with educational philosophies (Islamic, realism, pragmatism, and logical positivism), while the weakest correlations were observed with idealism. Additionally, it was found that the greatest influence of educational philosophies was on the teaching role, followed by the research role, and finally the community service role.

Keywords: Philosophical Preferences, Educational Philosophy, Faculty Members, Saudi Universities, Professional Roles.
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