I am trying to develop a construct called social skills of interns who work in some K-12 schools. Interestingly, I used "I tried to avoid school leaders (reversely coded), "whenever I have difficulties, I talk to my lead university mentor" , " my colleagues are supportive" and "my way of communication with my colleagues has been improved" to develop a construct. Before doing any factor analysis, I tried to run a correlation analysis. I found that the first 2 are negatively associated . However, whenever either of them is independently placed in the same correlation analysis with the other 2 variables, they are positively associated with the other 2. How can this be explained? Can I interpret that there may be less communication between school leaders and college mentors? Or can I explain that this may be because that students develop some kind of habit of asking for help from the same individuals?
Good Day, Zhijuan.
Probably there are two interrelated extraneous variables:
(1) Hierarchy. If school leaders are senior staff, then common students come with their concerns to their mentors and only after that their concerns should be readdressed to the senior staff. And the best students may discuss their concerns directly with senior staff.
(2) Educational motives. If school leaders are school teams’ captains, cheerleaders, volunteer organizers and so on, then social active students have more relations with such persons and students which are more involved in educational processes have more relations with their school mentors
And sorry for my English)))
Many thanks for your reply. I will integrate your thinking into my data interpretation.
In my opinion the first is ok, there may be less communication between leaders and mentors becasue de second is not a hypothesis you already are given a possible answer. I hope it helps you.
Social skills has more dimension than you have used, so the representation of this construct is not very well defined. furthermore, the first statement is very ambiguous, and the third statement could not be perceived as communication skill, it may be perceived as a psychological support.
good luck
Your items involve responding to a negative. Respondents may misinterpret the item. Check the distributions compared with other known items. In my experience, negative items are not the opposite of positive attitudes. Something else is going on in the responses. I would avoid making any interpretation of the meaning without a face to face discussion ("talk aloud") with the respondents to better understand what they were thinking in the responses.
I agree with Suter. Too ambiguous. Too many unknowns. Back stories are important. Mixed methods a possibility? Face to face (if available, skype, facetime etc) will give a better perception and experience. From my experience - call it a scenario- and please take this as a matter of my positionality) there is a “pecking order” or a hierarchy involved. The intern is trying to gain knowledge and achieve a certain level in an environment (among school leaders) that contains real experts in the field doing their job. They are helpful (some extremely casual about their mentorship toward you but helpful nonetheless) but still protective and serious about THEIR .... jobs. Simply stated, they have what you want. University mentors coach and encourage.Thats their job. A lykert scale with several (mostly selected) participants helped my earlier research in why parents respond/react and make school choice decisions the way they do toward their children’s present day education. Questions ranged from their childhood experiences to educational achievements, race and gender related issues into adulthood. Found many positive correlations. Once I focused on the correlation that best supported my experience/ assumptions, I then conducted interviews with a specialized interview guide for my convenient samples. Hope I provided insight.
Cuando se presenta ambigüedad en torno a una interrogante de investigación pienso que es importante un estudio de tipo exploratorio de orden cualitativo que se inicie con una aproximación metodológica de tipo mixta. Con ello utilizando por ejemplo entrevistas en profundidad con un análisis de discurso se puede acotar las variables. Despues de esa aproximación se puede elaborar un cuestionario y la información de esas fuentes se triangula con lo que aporta la literatura.
Both reasons are logical. The hierarchy in a triangle teacher * his superior * independent mentor is ambivalent a in Slovakia. Yes, school leaders have little to communicate with a mentor from an academic environment. Mentor is the teacher's authority in the field of expertise, but the school leaders in the management area.
(I will be curious about the opinions of other colleagues)
I think, your situation is close to the phrasal case of a glass which is either half full or half empty (contrary expression for identical reality). If complete the first two statements to comparable forms by expressing the evident and unexpressed information, the apparent contrary relation changes to complementary one. For example: „I tried to avoid heterogeneous body of school leaders in many of unpredictable cases" and „ however, in the case I had difficulties, I talked to a single person from the leaders body (who can help me)“. So, the equal positive relation of the second pair of statements to the first two of them is correct and regular with no contradiction.
Hello colleagues. I think that all the comments are sound and explain part of the academia reflection in the topic, but the items in question do not reflect such thought.
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