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.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 185-207 |
| Number of pages | 23 |
| Journal | International Journal of Research and Method in Education |
| Volume | 32 |
| Issue number | 2 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Jul 2009 |
Funding
The work on this project is supported by The Distributed Leadership Study (http://www.distrib-utedleadership.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.
Keywords
- Educational measurement
- General methodology
- Mixed methods
- Survey research
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Education