Dissertation research on women in educational administration : a synthesis of findings and paradigm for future research

Abstract

Within the field of educational administration, the study of women administrators has increased remarkably. However, although the woman administrator has become one of the most researched topics in the discipline during the 1970s, no definitive work which discusses the results of this research has been undertaken. The purpose of this dissertation is to fill this gap by analyzing dissertation literature from 1973-1978 on women in educational administration for the purpose of identifying issues which have been treated, determining the quality of the research, integrating the findings of this research, and formulating a paradigm for future research. This study uses four major strategies for integrating the findings: listing factors, taking a vote, averaging the statistics, and a meta-analytic approach. Additionally, a content analysis is performed on both the dissertation literature and the general managerial and social science literature on women in administration to identify the issues and trends in the research. The major units of analysis for this inquiry are doctoral dissertations on women in educational administration completed and abstracted from January 1973 through January 1979. The final sample consists of 114 studies. The average dissertation analyzed in this study is written by a female working with a male major advisor. She is a feminist who has earned her Ph. D. in a department of educational administration. She is likely to have been the only person at her university to write a dissertation on women in educational administration from 1973 to 1978, and she also is likely to be attending a university that is not a UCEA institution, but that does have a women's studies program. The average dissertation is likely to investigate the profile of the woman administrator, be approximately 175 pages in length, not be organized according to APA style, not test hypotheses, and to have been completed in 1976. The representative dissertation queried administrators at the K-12 level using the survey method with a paper and pencil questionnaire as the primary means for data collection. The results are analyzed according to the descriptive methods of frequency, percentages, or measures of central tendency, and hence, have excluded all forms of inferential statistics as well as bivariate and multivariate statistical techniques currently employed in survey analysis...