Teachers' Views on the Communication Skills of School Administrators: A Mixed Method Research

The purpose of the present study was to determine teachers' views on the communication skills of school administrators through a mixed methods design. Although quantitative or qualitative studies deal with the communication skills of school principals according to teacher perceptions, the number of studies conducted in mixed design is quite low. The study's quantitative data were obtained from 368, and the qualitative data were obtained from 20 teachers working in primary, secondary, and high schools in Acipayam and Tavas districts of Denizli province in Turkey. The data were collected via the "Interpersonal Communication Skills Scale of Primary School Administrators" developed by Sahin (2007) and through an interview form developed by the researchers. For the quantitative data analysis, arithmetic mean, standard deviation, t-test and one-way analysis of variance were applied as a content analysis were carried out in the qualitative data analysis. When the results were examined, it was observed that the communication skills of the school administrators were at a high level, and it was revealed that their communication skills were at the highest level in the dimension of "giving confidence", while it was at the lowest level in the dimension of "giving feedback". There are significant differences in school administrators' communication skill levels considering the branch's variables, teachers' tenure at school, school type, and the number of teachers. It has been seen that the quantitative and qualitative data of the research support each other.