Examining school leadership in a transitional context: A mixed-methods study of leadership practices and school cultures as mechanisms of educational change

This research presents the results of studies designed to observe the effects of school leadership and school culture as mechanisms of change in the context of a large-scale educational reform in Bosnia and Herzegovina. A mixed-methods approach was employed to illuminate how institutional context either activates or deactivates leadership and school cultures as mechanisms that influence teacher efficacy beliefs in times of large-scale educational reform. Quantitative and qualitative data were analyzed through three independent studies. Quantitative procedures included measurement model analysis, structural equation modeling and a non-parametric Mann-Whitney U test. The qualitative analytic approach encompassed procedures of content analysis and quantification of qualitative data from reform documents and semi-structured interviews in the form of hierarchical clustering and multidimensional scaling. The triangulation of findings occurred in the interpretation phase, characterized by the development of meta-inferences that go beyond the findings from each study.