Educational Leadership Research: Methodological Trends (2016-2019)

The purpose of the review is to explore the main methodological approaches used to research leadership in the field of education. This article offers a small-scale systematic review spanning three years of empirical research (from 2016 to 2019) on educational leadership. Practice within the field focused on stories told by former educational leaders, and their prescriptions for practice were based on their ideological beliefs and personal experiences in life. 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 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 qualitative studies, while surveys and close-ended questionnaires have been dominant methods to collect quantitative data in this area. The average number of participants involved in the qualitative studies was 30, and 400 was a good sample size for quantitative studies. The most widely used methods for analyzing qualitative data were grounded theory, thematic analysis, and content analysis. The primary methods for analyzing quantitative data were factor analysis and descriptive statistics analysis. This systematic review represents diverse and rich resources for current and future scholarship. Studying these resources provides a better appreciation of how methodological approaches have been developed in the field of educational leadership and management over time.