A Systematic Review of Methodological Approaches in Educational Leadership Research from 2016 to 2019

Abstract

This article offers a small-scale systematic review spanning three years of empirical research (from 2016 to 2019) on educational leadership. The purpose of the review is to explore the main methodological approaches used to research leadership in the field of education. To identify suitable empirical research studies a bounded search was carried out into specific bibliographic databases such as, “Educational Resources Information Centre” (ERIC), and “The British Educational Leadership, Management and Administration Society” (BELMAS). In total, 23 empirical studies on educational leadership were sampled from 11 peer-reviewed journals. The review employed a quantitative approach to analyse the sample studies especially focusing on three sets of variables: 1) research designs, 2) sample size, and 3) techniques of data analysis employed in the selected studies. The findings suggest that from 2016 onward mixed methods and case study research designs have become increasingly important in the field of educational leadership. Interviews, observations, focus groups and document analysis have been the most common data collection methods in the qualitative studies, while surveys and close-ended questionnaires have been dominant methods to collect quantitative data in this area. The average numbers of participants involved in the qualitative studies were 30, and 400 as a good sample size for quantitative studies. The most popular techniques used to analyse qualitative information were content analysis, thematic analysis and grounded theory. Wherein descriptive statistics analysis and factor analysis were the main techniques to analyse quantitative data.