DOI: 10.3886/icpsr33582.v1
title: RETA: Chicago School Staff Social Network Questionnaire Qualitative Interviews, 2006
title: Version 1

description: The Chicago School Staff Social Network Questionnaire Qualitative Interviews, 2006, is a part of the RETA: Distributed Leadership for Middle School Mathematics Education: Content Area Leadership Expertise in Practice study. The goal of RETA was to design and validate a series of research instruments to identify leadership for mathematics instruction in middle schools and for documenting instructional leadership practice. Adopting a distributed perspective on leadership, this work focused on both formally designated and informal leaders and their leadership routines. The objective was to develop valid and reliable instruments that make the day-to-day practice of school leadership for mathematics instruction more transparent, as well as measure changes in this practice over time. This project utilized Social Network Surveys, Experience Sampling Methods (ESM), and Daily Practice Logs. To validate these instruments, a combination of shadowing, end of day cognitive interviews, and semi-structured interviews was used. These instruments were used to describe and analyze when and how teachers and other educators solicit or provide instructional advice and the degree to which these resources influence their work. In order to validate the survey, qualitative interviews were conducted with a subset of teachers at 6 of these 22 schools in early Spring 2006. A purposeful sample of schools was selected to maximize variation so that the sample included two public schools (an elementary and a middle school), two Catholic schools, and two charter schools. The interviewees were selected based on an analysis of the SSSNQ data. Using a purposeful sampling strategy, the following were selected in each school: formal leaders (i.e., Principal, Assistant Principal, Math Specialist, Literacy Specialist), informal leaders (i.e., two teachers who were not formally designated leaders but had more people go to them for math advice relative to other people in their school), and followers (i.e., two to four teachers who were not formal or informal leaders). Interviews with 49 staff members focused mainly on their advice-seeking practices around mathematics instruction. Using a semi-structured protocol, researchers asked interviewees about their advice or knowledge seeking related to mathematics instruction and their views of leadership and change efforts underway at the school.
description: The program of research and development addresses three main goals: To describe and analyze content leadership practices for middle school mathematics instruction and generate empirical evidence concerning which of these practices enables improvement in mathematics teaching and learning.; To describe the dimensions of knowledge for content leadership in mathematics at the middle school level and design, pilot, and validate these instruments for measuring content leadership knowledge.; To generate more robust empirical evidence about whether and how content leadership knowledge can be learned through both formal learning opportunities (e.g., MSPs, Institute Partnerships) and informal on-the-job learning.;
description: ICPSR data undergo a confidentiality review and are altered when necessary to limit the risk of disclosure. ICPSR also routinely creates ready-to-go data files along with setups in the major statistical software formats as well as standard codebooks to accompany the data. In addition to these procedures, ICPSR performed the following processing steps for this data collection: Performed recodes and/or calculated derived variables..
description: Datasets: 
 
 DS0: Study-Level Files 
 DS1: Chicago Qualitative Interview Data - School C Teacher AB 
 DS2: Chicago Qualitative Interview Data - School C Teacher AE 
 DS3: Chicago Qualitative Interview Data - School C Teacher AG 
 DS4: Chicago Qualitative Interview Data - School C Teacher AI 
 DS5: Chicago Qualitative Interview Data - School C Teacher AJ 
 DS6: Chicago Qualitative Interview Data - School C Teacher AM 
 DS7: Chicago Qualitative Interview Data - School C Teacher AP 
 DS8: Chicago Qualitative Interview Data - School C Teacher AR 
 DS9: Chicago Qualitative Interview Data - School C Teacher AV 
 DS10: Chicago Qualitative Interview Data - School C Teacher AZ 
 DS11: Chicago Qualitative Interview Data - School D Teacher AA 
 DS12: Chicago Qualitative Interview Data - School D Teacher AH 
 DS13: Chicago Qualitative Interview Data - School D Teacher AN 
 DS14: Chicago Qualitative Interview Data - School D Teacher AQ 
 DS15: Chicago Qualitative Interview Data - School D Teacher AR 
 DS16: Chicago Qualitative Interview Data - School D Teacher AS 
 DS17: Chicago Qualitative Interview Data - School D Teacher AU 
 DS18: Chicago Qualitative Interview Data - School G Teacher AC 
 DS19: Chicago Qualitative Interview Data - School G Teacher AE 
 DS20: Chicago Qualitative Interview Data - School G Teacher AF 
 DS21: Chicago Qualitative Interview Data - School G Teacher AH 
 DS22: Chicago Qualitative Interview Data - School G Teacher AJ 
 DS23: Chicago Qualitative Interview Data - School G Teacher AK 
 DS24: Chicago Qualitative Interview Data - School G Teacher AP 
 DS25: Chicago Qualitative Interview Data - School H Teacher AA 
 DS26: Chicago Qualitative Interview Data - School H Teacher AD 
 DS27: Chicago Qualitative Interview Data - School H Teacher AF 
 DS28: Chicago Qualitative Interview Data - School H Teacher AH 
 DS29: Chicago Qualitative Interview Data - School H Teacher AK 
 DS30: Chicago Qualitative Interview Data - School H Teacher AM 
 DS31: Chicago Qualitative Interview Data - School H Teacher AN 
 DS32: Chicago Qualitative Interview Data - School H Teacher AP 
 DS33: Chicago Qualitative Interview Data - School I Teacher AB 
 DS34: Chicago Qualitative Interview Data - School I Teacher AD 
 DS35: Chicago Qualitative Interview Data - School I Teacher AE 
 DS36: Chicago Qualitative Interview Data - School I Teacher AF 
 DS37: Chicago Qualitative Interview Data - School I Teacher AH 
 DS38: Chicago Qualitative Interview Data - School I Teacher AK 
 DS39: Chicago Qualitative Interview Data - School I Teacher AM 
 DS40: Chicago Qualitative Interview Data - School I Teacher AN 
 DS41: Chicago Qualitative Interview Data - School I Teacher AP 
 DS42: Chicago Qualitative Interview Data - School K Teacher AA 
 DS43: Chicago Qualitative Interview Data - School K Teacher AF 
 DS44: Chicago Qualitative Interview Data - School K Teacher AL 
 DS45: Chicago Qualitative Interview Data - School K Teacher AO 
 DS46: Chicago Qualitative Interview Data - School K Teacher AU 
 DS47: Chicago Qualitative Interview Data - School K Teacher AV 
 DS48: Chicago Qualitative Interview Data - School K Teacher AW 
 DS49: Chicago Qualitative Interview Data - School K Teacher BH
description: RETA Distributed Leadership for Middle School Mathematics Education: Content Area Leadership Expertise in Practice Series
description: face-to-face interview 
The pseudonyms (two-letter codes) for interview participants used in this study can be linked to the variable "pseudoname" from the Chicago School Staff Social Network Questionnaire Longitudinal Study, 2005-2008 (ICPSR 32921).
description: School teachers and leaders in one large urban midwestern school district who participated in the Chicago School Staff Social Network Questionnaire Longitudinal Study, 2005-2006 (ICPSR 32921). Smallest Geographic Unit: city
description: A purposeful sample of schools was selected from the Chicago School Staff Social Network Questionnaire, 2005-2006 to maximize variation so that the sample included two public schools (an elementary and a middle school), two Catholic schools, and two charter schools. Interviewees were selected based on the analysis of the SSSNQ data. Using a purposeful sampling strategy the following were selected in each school: formal leaders (i.e., Principal, Assistant Principal, Math Specialist, Literacy Specialist), informal leaders (i.e., two teachers who were not formally designated leaders but had more people go to them for math advice relative to other people in their school), and followers (i.e., two to four teachers who were not formal or informal leaders). Forty-nine staff members were interviewed across the six schools.