70: Developing a Multivariate, Multilevel Model to Measure Consistency of Educational Leadership

Music City Center 

Principal leadership is a multifaceted effort. The literature is barren on consistency of principal leadership across multiple policy domains. The issue is under-researched but important to leadership training and evaluation and critical to study teacher and student behaviors. The practical importance is operationalized in this paper. It will develop a multivariate, multilevel model that can measure consistency of principal leadership as perceived by teachers across multiple domains. The first level is a mathematical device to set up a multivariate environment. The second level is the teacher model in which teacher characteristics can be used to adjust their ratings of the multiple domains. The third level is the school model in which school characteristics can be used to adjust school (average) ratings of the multiple domains by teachers. A matrix is generated at the school level with variances for the multiple domains on the diagonal and covariances among the domains off the diagonal. This vector is distributed as multivariate normal. Correlations can be calculated from the variance-covariance matrix to measure consistency of principal leadership across the multiple domains.

Consistency of principal leadership

Multiple policy domains

Multivariate, multilevel modeling 

Social Statistics Section