Using social network methods to study school leadership

Abstract

Social network analysis is increasingly used in the study of policy implementation and school leadership. A key question that remains is that of instrument validity – that is, the question of whether these social network survey instruments measure what they purport to measure. In this paper, we describe our work to examine the validity of the School Staff Social Network Questionnaire (SSSNQ), an instrument designed to study instructional leadership practice. To examine the validity of the survey, we conducted two studies. The first involved administration of the SSSNQ in 22 schools and interviews with a sub‐sample of school staff in six of these schools. The second study involved cognitive interviews in which interviewees were asked to ‘think aloud’ as they completed a revised version of the SSSNQ. Our findings indicate that the SSSNQ did identify leadership operationalized as social influence interactions. Furthermore, the SSSNQ allowed us to move away from an exclusive focus on school principals and other formally designated leaders to include non‐positional leaders, and allowed us to capture informal leadership interactions that would have been missed had we focused solely on formal organizational routines. In this respect, the SSSNQ offers an important research instrument for examining school leadership.

Keywords:

• educational measurement
• general methodology
• mixed methods
• survey research

Acknowledgements

The work on this project is supported by The Distributed Leadership Study (http://www.distributedleadership.org), funded by research grants from the National Science Foundation (RETA Grant HER‐0412510), with support from Northwestern University’s School of Education and Social Policy and Institute for Policy Research. We gratefully acknowledge our research team and all those who contributed to the various stages of this effort, especially James Pustejovsky for his work on the design and implementation of the survey and his many helpful comments on our analysis, and also Yondi Morris, Camille Rutherford, Michelle Blum, Liza Sullivan, Laura Grandau, and Amber Pareja for their help with data collection. All opinions and conclusions expressed in this paper are our own and do not reflect the views of any funding agency.

Notes

1. We suspect that providing respondents with school staff rosters may have resulted in respondents focusing on internal names over external names.

2. In this second version of the survey we did not provide staff with rosters.

3. Neither of the charter schools had an assistant principal; only the public schools had maths specialists and literacy specialists.

4. This notion that the informal leaders are those who have many people go to them for advice was based on our assumption that the person who is sought after for advice is cast as the leader in these interactions. As we discuss later in this paper, our findings indicate that some caution should be applied in making this assumption.

5. Though we interviewed 49 people in total, two of them were not asked about maths; rather, one of these was asked about instruction in general and one was asked about literacy instruction. Therefore, we did not include them in this part of the analysis.

6. The number of advice‐seeking instances per interviewee ranged from 1 to 6, and the average number of instances per interviewee was 2.09.

7. Interestingly, the interviews contained no instances of vision‐setting – another important organizational function; this may be an aspect of leadership that is less likely to be sought than offered, and therefore less likely to come up when people are asked about who they go to for advice; we discuss this further later in the paper.

8. All interviewee names are pseudonyms.