A friend of mine is conducting a study on "Principals' managerial skills and School effectiveness". The dependent variable of the study is school effectiveness. The researcher intends to find out whether the following managerial skills - Communication, decision-making, and supervisory skills correlate with school effectiveness. School effectiveness was measured as a product of teachers', students' and administrators' effectiveness. For considering teachers, students, and principals themselves in the dependent variable, the researcher states that the "population of his study comprised 810 school leaders (270 principals and 540 principals), 2,5763 teachers and 13,890 students. From this population, 10 per cent each of principals, teachers and students were selected at random for the study. Is there anything wrong with the population? A lecturer who is not even the supervisor said it's wrong, but I felt he was right since teachers, students and school administrators are taking part in the study. The lecturer said the population has to be unitary, and as such, all the secondary schools should rather be used.
The idea of this lecturer about population choice has affected many students' theses. Thus, I decided to bring this topic here up to get the opinions of other experts regarding the choice of population.
I can't see how it is possibly wrong to study more than one population, but I am open to hearing why that lecturer thought it was.
It should not be an issue if there are multiple population units. However, looking at the details you have provided about the research, I think I might have an idea of where the lecturer in question is coming from. One way of thinking about the population is the group you'd want your research findings to be generalized to. So if School Effectiveness is what your friend is looking at, it might make sense to consider the schools (i.e., people within the schools) as the population. There is nothing wrong with the design I think. Your friend just has to rephrase how they have written about the population.
Dear Mr. Owan!
Yes, multiple case - study research can address multiple populations e.g. groups of students, teachers, mangers, etc. when combined with proper quantitative methods:
1) Coplan, B., Evans, B.C. How organizational culture influences holistic review: a qualitative multiple case study. Adv in Health Sci Educ (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10459-021-10055-w, Free access: Article How organizational culture influences holistic review: a qua...
2) Enikő Orsolya Bereczki, Andrea Kárpáti (2021). Technology-enhanced creativity: A multiple case study of digital technology-integration expert teachers’ beliefs and practices, Thinking Skills and Creativity, Volume 39, March 2021, Free access:Article Technology-enhanced creativity: A multiple case study of dig...
Yours sincerely, Bulcsu Szekely
I agree that multiple populations can be used. Maybe, to further analyse the data and its implications, can do sub-group analysis
It happens that the reviewer is distinguishing two different concepts.
The reviewer assumes the population as a single set, in which there are three types of samples (subsets): principals, teachers and students.
This concept of population is global and inclusive for the samples, but it obeys a theory, a school, very solid, by the way, but it is not the only one: (http://observatorio.epacartagena.gov.co/wp-content /uploads/2017/08/metodologia-de-la-investigacion-sexta-edicion.compressed.pdf)
Perhaps if the author of the thesis, his friend, made that reservation, he would end up convincing him.
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