2015 Theses Doctoral

Commitment and Leadership: What we know from the Schools and Staffing Survey

Boyce, Jared Levy

This three-article dissertation extends prior educational leadership research by analyzing the Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS) using three distinct methodologies: meta-narrative review, three-step latent class analysis, and four-fold cross-validation multilevel factor analysis. The first study employed a meta-narrative review of twenty-five years of quantitative educational leadership research based on SASS, integrating findings from over one hundred studies into a joint framework of instructional leadership and leadership for learning. The second study utilized three-step latent class analysis of the 2007-08 SASS administration and its companion 2008-09 Principal Follow-up Survey to identify two significantly different groups of exiting principals: "Satisfied" exiting principals and "Disaffected" exiting principals. The third study examined how individual teachers and teachers collectively have different perceptions of leadership for learning, using four-fold cross-validation multilevel factor analysis on the 2011-12 SASS administration to discover that individual teachers perceive leadership for learning as a collection of six factors while collectively teachers perceive leadership for learning as a collection of three factors that are non-isomorphic with the individual-level factors. Each of the three dissertation articles discusses implications for both theory and practice from each set of results.