Dissertations and Theses @ UNI
Availability
Open Access Dissertation
Keywords
School principals--Iowa; School superintendents--Iowa; School management and organization--Iowa;
Abstract
In 1981-82, two school districts in the state of Iowa shared one superintendent; in 1985-86, 10 districts shared five superintendents; by 1991-92, 116 school districts reported sharing 58 superintendents. Studies on the shared superintendency suggested that role overload accompanied the position and that superintendents reacted to the increased workload by delegating responsibilities, often to building principals. The primary purpose of this study was to determine if there were significant differences in the perceived responsibilities of Iowa secondary principals serving shared superintendents and Iowa secondary principals serving nonshared superintendents. In addition, the study determined if significant relationships existed between Iowa and secondary principals' perceived responsibilities and demographic characteristics of the secondary principal population.
The investigator utilized a modified version of ASCD's Zero-Based Job Analysis Questionnaire. The instrument contained a demographic profile and 80 items written in a Likert-scale manner that composed eight responsibility categories of secondary principals. In November of 1991 and after a pilot study, the investigator mailed the newly created instrument to 99 secondary principals serving shared superintendents and to 99 randomly selected secondary principals serving nonshared superintendents. One hundred eighty-nine of the 198 principals responded (95%) with 148 meeting criteria for inclusion in the study. After computation of descriptive statistics, the investigator applied factor analysis to two responsibility category subgroups, substantiating the hypothesis formulation procedures and justifying discriminant analysis to be performed on the perceived responsibilities of the two groups of secondary principals. The investigator then applied independent t tests to determine differences in perception for the two groups of principals in the eight categories and Pearson product-moment correlation to determine whether significant relationships existed between the principals' perceived responsibilities in the eight categories and the demographic characteristics of the population.
The investigator found significant differences, at the.05 level, in perceived responsibilities between Iowa secondary principals serving shared superintendents and Iowa secondary principals serving nonshared superintendents in a composite of the responsibility categories: student services, student supervision and professional preparation; and in two individual categories: personnel selection/evaluation and professional preparation. The investigator found the relationships between the principals' perceived responsibilities and the demographic characteristics of the population to be too small to be clearly interpretable.
Year of Submission
1992
Degree Name
Doctor of Education
Department
Department of Educational Administration and Counseling
First Advisor
David Else (co-advisor)
Second Advisor
Robert H. Decker (co-advisor)
Date Original
12-1992
Object Description
1 PDF file (ix, 150 pages)
Copyright
©1992 Dale E. Greimann
Language
en
File Format
application/pdf
Recommended Citation
Greimann, Dale E., "An investigation of the responsibilities of secondary principals serving shared and nonshared superintendents" (1992). Dissertations and Theses @ UNI. 826.
https://scholarworks.uni.edu/etd/826
