Middle School Climate Examined and Altered by Teacher-Directed Intervention Assessed through Qualitative and Quantitative Methodologies

Abstract

A program of research designed to assess the climate of academically-excelling middle schools is described. Two approaches not previously used in such research have shown promise, namely, 1) the application of mixed (qualitative and quantitative) analytic methods and 2) the involvement of the middle school teachers as co-researchers.Many identical dimensions of school climate were identified by the quantitative and qualitative approaches applied separately. However, important aspects of school climate emerged from interviews and faculty meetings (qualitative data) that were not identified in quantitative questionnaires. Similarly, climate issues that were not highlighted in the qualitative data emerged from questionnaires. The integrated data yielded a picture of the climate in each school that was more complex than that which would have emerged from the application of only one of the analytic methods. This finding strongly indicates that unique dimensions of a school’s climate may be missed and the level of its complexity may be underestimated if qualitative and quantitative methods are applied separately.A set of climate-related issues was assembled for each school and utilized by teacher co-researchers to design interventions that were targeted at climate issues particularly salient to their middle school and that could be directed solely by them.We conclude that the complexity of middle school climate is best examined via a mixed methodology combining qualitative and quantitative approaches and that the development of potentially climate-enriching interventions would have been less responsive to teachers’ concerns and would have less teacher acceptance, if the teacher co-researchers had been provided with only quantitative or only qualitative data.