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

整合个人和组织变化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案》（No Child Left Behind Act，简称NCLB）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理想的环境。在这个合作研究项目中，研究人员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。该研究建立在这些学校的早期研究（REC-0231981）的基础上，并将分析社会网络和社会过程如何响应NCLB政策而发生变化。主要问题是“在实施以前的改革和创新过程中形成的社会过程和结构是如何促使和限制教师对新的制度力量（如NCLB）的反应的？”为了解决这些问题，研究人员将采用问卷调查和访谈的方式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会网络的纵向数据。研究人员将结合组织功能的案例分析、社会网络分析对关系和网络随时间变化的模型选择、多层次模型来检验网络关系和个体特征对教师变化的影响。调查结果将有助于了解学校作为社会组织如何应对多项改革，以及获取社会资源如何影响对变革压力的反应。在强大的外部压力下检查不断发展的变化动态的机会可以广泛地告知对变化浪潮下个人和组织适应的期望。这项研究强有力的发现可能表明，发展更动态的视角的必要性，或者可能表明，即使在巨大的压力下，社交网络也相当稳定。

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.