DHB: Collaborative Research: Analyzing the Flow of Network-Embedded Expertise in Schools: A Longitudinal Study of Individual and Organizational Change

整合个人和组织变革的账户是社会和行为科学的一个基本挑战。联邦《不让一个孩子掉队法》（NCLB）规定的制裁威胁给学校带来了新的制度压力，这为研究组织和个人对外部变革压力的反应提供了一个理想的背景。在这个合作研究项目中，研究人员正在使用社会网络分析作为加州12所学校样本变化过程纵向研究的一部分。这项研究建立在早期的研究（REC-0231981）在这些学校，并将分析如何社交网络和社会进程的变化，以响应NCLB政策。主要问题是“在实施以前的改革和创新过程中形成的社会进程和结构如何使教师能够和限制教师对新的制度力量，如NCLB的反应？“为了解决这些问题，研究人员将通过问卷和访谈收集教师课堂教学实践、校长和其他行政领导行为以及教师社交网络的纵向数据。然后，研究人员将使用组织功能的案例分析，社会网络分析模型的关系和网络随着时间的推移变化的选择相结合，和多层次的模型来测试网络关系和个人特征对教师变化的影响。调查结果将建立一个了解学校作为社会组织如何应对多种改革，以及如何获得社会资源的影响，以改变压力的反应。有机会在强大的外部压力下研究不断变化的变化动态，可以广泛地了解个人和组织在变化浪潮下的适应期望。这项研究的强有力的发现可能表明需要发展一个更动态的视角，或者可能表明社交网络即使在巨大的压力下也相当稳定。

Integrating accounts of individual and organizational change is a fundamental challenge in the social and behavioral sciences. New institutional pressures on schools, brought about by the threat of sanctions under the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), provide an ideal context for studying organizational and individual responses to exogenous pressures for change. In this collaborative research project, researchers are using social network analysis as part of a longitudinal study of change processes in a sample of 12 schools in California. The study builds on an earlier study (REC-0231981) in these schools and will analyze how social networks and social processes change in response to NCLB policies. The principal question is "How do social processes and structures formed during the implementation of previous reforms and innovations enable and constrain teachers' responses to new institutional forces such as NCLB?" To address these questions, researchers will collect longitudinal data on teachers' classroom teaching practices, principal and other administrative leadership behaviors, and on teachers' social networks using questionnaires and interviews. Researchers will then use a combination of case analyses of organizational functioning, social network analyses to model selection of ties and change in networks over time, and multi-level models to test the influence of network ties and individual characteristics on teacher change. Findings will build an understanding of how schools respond as social organizations to multiple reforms and how access to social resources influences responses to pressures for change. The opportunity to examine evolving change dynamics under strong outside pressure can broadly inform expectations about individual and organizational adaptation under waves of change. Strong findings from the study may make evident the need to develop a more dynamic perspective or may suggest that social networks are quite stable even under massive pressure.