Developing Indicators of Desirable Characteristics in Principles of Sufficiency Economy Philosophy in One’s Way of Life for Primary School Students

Abstract

Promotion of learners to have sufficient learning is an important thing,
causing organization of learning and teaching to be more efficient, and it can
develop learners to be balanced smartness, goodness and happiness. Thus this
study aimed to develop indicators of desirable characteristics in terms of
sufficiency living of primary school students, and to analyze factors of sufficiency
living of 524 primary school students in the second semester of the academic
year of 2010, obtained using the two-stage random sampling technique. The
instruments used were an open-ended questionnaire and a questionnaire on
being sufficiency of the primary school students. The collected data were analyzed
using basic statistics, an exploratory factor analysis using statistic packages, and a
confirmatory factor analysis using LISREL 8.72 program.
The study findings revealed that the second confirmatory factor had
loadings of indicators of sufficiency living of primary school students in all the
5 aspects were positive ranging 0.61-1.81 at the .01 level of significance with
loadings being in this order from the highest to the lower loadings : reasonableness,
self-behaving appropriately, environmental conservation, self-discipline, and thrift
and diligence with loadings of 1.81, 1.00, 0.99 and 0.61 respectively. In each
factors of sufficiency living showed variance together with factors of indicators
of sufficiency living of primary school students. That was, the factor of reasonableness
was the most important while the factor of thrift and diligence was the least
important to sufficiency living. The indices of level of harmony between the
model and the empirical data had Chi-square of 957.92, p = 0.05 is equal to
the degrees of freedom (df) = 888, GFI = 0 .93, AGFI = 0.90, CFI = 1.00, SRMR =
0.058, RMSEA = 0.012, showing that the model had a construct validity.
In conclusion, the development of indicators of desirable characteristics
in terms of sufficiency living of primary school students could be obtained
directly from students. The obtained indicators could be applied to those
involved in the use of the sufficiency economy philosophy into practice.