Testing a longitudinal model of distributed leadership effects on school improvement

A central premise in the literature on leadership highlights its central role in organizational change. In light of the strength of this conceptual association, it is striking to note the paucity of large-scale empirical studies that have investigated how leadership impacts performance improvement in organizations over time. Indeed evidence-based conclusions concerning the impact of leadership on organizational change are drawn largely from case studies and cross-sectional surveys. Neither approach satisfies the design requirements for studying the contribution of leadership to performance improvement in organizations. This paper tests a longitudinal, multilevel model of change in distributed leadership, school improvement capacity, and student performance over a four-year period. The results suggest that change in distributed leadership and organizational capacity for improvement make significant contributions to growth in student learning in reading and math.     

Organizations and Alienation: The Mediation Hypothesis Revisited*

It is a widely accepted premise of mass society theory that voluntary associations play an important integrating role in modern society by mediating between the individual and the remote influences on life, work, and politics. There are two major variants of the mediation hypothesis: (1) purely social interaction within organizations lessens alienation in immediate relationships; (2) interaction accompanied by political exposures reduces alienation in the political domain. Controlling for social class, activity in instrumental, political groups is associated with significantly lower levels of political alienation. Activity in nonpolitical, social organizations is found to have more general attitudinal consequences—both for levels of social alienation and for estrangement from political processes. These patterns suggest that, despite the consistent effects of SES on nonalienative beliefs, voluntary associations provide independent settings of social and political integration.     

Computer-aided content analysis: A short primer

This paper is a short introduction to computer-aided content analysis in which words or phrases are the basic units. The advantages of computer-aided content analysis are noted and some general issues in its use discussed. Several ways of manipulating text by computer are then illustrated, including ordered word frequency lists, key-word-in-context lists, concordances, classifications of text in terms of content categories, category counts, and category-based retrievals from text. Although examples are based on Democratic and Republican platforms in presidential campaigns, these techniques can be applied to texts from a variety of sources, including in-depth and open-ended interviews, fieldnotes, letters, speeches, newspapers, books, and diaries, to cite a few examples.This research was supported in part by Kurzweil Computer Products, Inc., a subsidiary of Xerox Corp. Sue Williamson of Kurzweil played a key role, and her generosity and help is gratefully acknowledged. Randi Lynn Miller assisted with data entry at an earlier phase of research. Additional support has been provided by ZUMA, the Center for Surveys, Methods, and Analysis, Mannheim, FRG. For helpful comments and suggestions, thanks to Tom Davenport, Peter Mohler, J. Zvi Namenwirth, Philip J. Stone, and especially one anonymous reviewer. Thanks also to Kathy Tenerowicz for research assistance and to Barbara Norman for editorial assistance.     

Some remarks on conditional and unconditional inference for location-scale models

Conditional and unconditional confidence intervals have been compared by Grice, Bain, and Engelhardt (Commun. Statist. B7 (1978), 515–524) in terms of the location-scale model with double-exponential distribution form. Preference was found for the conditional intervals based on mean length and coverage probability for untrue parameters values. These two criteria for a location-scale system are shown to be inappropriate criteria for assessing the conditional versus unconditional approaches to inference. The usual ancillarity concept is also noted to be inappropriate. Support for many conditional analyses, however, is found in a more careful formulation of the statistical model.     

A Stock-Take of Green National Accounting Initiatives

Green national accounting has existed in a variety of forms for just over thirty years. Having essentially begun as environmental cost adjustments to Gross Domestic Product, green national accounting now includes such indicators as the Genuine Progress Indicator, Genuine Savings, and the Ecological Footprint. This paper serves as an overview or stock-take of green national accounting initiatives and as a means of assessing the major developments since the early 1970s. It is concluded that a suite of indicators is required to convey a complete picture of a nation’s sustainable development performance. In addition, economic indicators need to be supplemented by biophysical indicators, although the latter should never be incorporated directly into national income accounts since they serve as indicators of ecological sustainability, not of economic performance. Finally, the fact that a number of recently established indicators are still in the embryonic stage of development means that considerable refinement is necessary before they are likely to be broadly accepted by the policy-making community.