Validated questionnaire trial

Despite the decision to use Gruenert and Valentine’s already validated questionnaire, I

decided to conduct a further trial to test the success of the amendments agreed and establish if further changes were necessary. The trial survey (Appendix 7) was administered in my own school, a large 11 – 18 amalgamated comprehensive, in May 2014. All teachers were asked to complete and return forms within a week. 61 forms were returned out of a possible 76 (80%) and data was analysed using the statistical package SPSS. I also attached a short survey to ten of the trial participants and their responses indicated that the questionnaire was ready to use. Despite the validation of Gruenert and Valentine’s original survey, because of the minor changes I had made to some of the vocabulary, I decided to re-test the internal consistency of

8 _{Permission to use the Gruenert and Valentine survey was granted as shown in Appendix 6 and the amendments}

made to the questionnaire are shown in Appendix 8

 9 _{The addition of a 36}th _{question asking for a general overall perspective of school culture. The}

rationale for this was to provide a summative view of school culture to complement the overall perspective of culture acquired from combining answers to all the questions.

 The use of the word vison rather than mission in question 5, 12 and 27. This suggestion was made since I felt that British teachers were more likely to feel more familiar with the concept of their school’s vision rather than mission.

 The use of the phase “school leaders” rather than “leaders” or “administrators” in questions: 2, 11, 28, and 32. I suggested this amendment to ensure greater clarity about the context of leadership

 The use of the phrase “my faculty / department “rather than “the faculty.” I suggested this amendment to provide clarity about context.

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the questionnaire, examining the relationship between each factor, using Cronbach’s alpha test. Cronbach's alpha is an index of reliability associated with the variation accounted for by the true score of the ‘underlying construct’ and it is the hypothetical variable that is being measured (Hatcher, 1994). The Alpha co-efficient ranges in value from 0 to 1 and may be used to describe the reliability of factors extracted from dichotomous (questions with two possible answers) and/or multi-point formatted questionnaires or scales (rating scale: 1 = poor, 5 = excellent). The higher the score, the more reliable the generated scale. Nunnaly (1978) has determined 0.7 to be an acceptable reliability co-efficient but lower thresholds are also sometimes used in the literature.

Table 5.1: Case Processing Summary

N %

Cases Valid 59 96.7 Excluded 2 3.3

Total 61 100.0

Table 5.2: Reliability Test

Cronbach's Alpha Cronbach's Alpha Based on Standardized Items N of Items .928 .927 36

Table 5.1 shows the number of valid cases, with no missing data on the selected variables. In this case nearly 97% of responses are valid. Table 5.2 lists the Cronbach’s alpha and an alpha based on standardised items. The Cronbach alpha score of 0.928 indicates very good internal consistency (above 0.70) for the questionnaire in general and its 36 elements. In addition, Appendix 9 demonstrates that the individual Cronbach score (Cronbach Alpha if item deleted) for each of the questions was between 0.924 and 0.930 (highlighted in Appendix 9). This shows that removing any of the questions would not significantly enhance the internal consistency of the questionnaire. The outcome of the reliability analysis indicated that no further revision was needed beyond that already described and the questionnaire was used for the full study.

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Principal axis factor analysis with varimax rotation was also conducted to assess the underlying structure for the 35 items of the school culture questionnaire. (Question 36 was removed since it was not designed to fit one of the cultural components.) Six factors were requested, based on the items designed to index six constructs: Collaborative Leadership; Professional Development; Collegial Support; Teacher Collaboration; Unity of Purpose; and Learning Partnership. After rotation, the first factor accounted for 21% of the variance and the second factor accounted for 30% of the variance. The first factor which identifies

Collaborative Leadership had strong loadings on the first 14 items. The second factor, which identifies Professional Development, had high loadings on four items. "School Leadership value teachers' ideas (CL2) had its highest loading for the first factor and "the school values overall improvement" (PD30) had the highest loading for the second factor. Factor three, Collegial Support had a high loading for four items whilst factors four, Teacher Collaboration and five, Unity of Purpose both had high loadings for three items. The final factor, Learning Partnership had a high loading for one factor.

Table 5.3: KMO and Bartlett's Test

Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin Measure of Sampling Adequacy. .929 Bartlett's Test of Sphericity Approx. Chi-Square 3278.124

df 595

Sig. .000

Finally, a statistical procedure (Kaiser-Mayer Olkin Measure of sampling adequacy), shown in Table 5.3, was conducted to measure the quality of the correlations between variables. The KMO test scored 0.929, which, since it was close to 1, showed that there were enough items for each factor whilst the Bartlett test of Sphericity measure was less than 0.05 indicating that the correlation matric is sufficiently different from an identity matrix and that variances are equal across groups or samples. Thus, the factor analysis results applied to the amended Gruenert and Valentine (1998) questionnaire provided support for the validity of the six cultural concepts in the questionnaire. Secure in the knowledge that the amended Gruenert and Valentine (1998) questionnaire was able to measure teacher perceptions of school culture and its components effectively, and the terminology used was clearly defined10 (Gruenert

1. 10 _{Collaborative Leadership (principles value teachers’ ideas) measures the degree to which school}

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1998), I developed the analysis to include a further series of variables which would test a range of hypotheses relating to the individual context of each participant. The objective was to ascertain if perceptions of school culture were influenced by the participants’ age; gender; number of years spent in their current school, number of years in teaching and role / position in school. The outcomes of this analysis are presented in Chapter 9.