Early Childhood Education Commons^™

Innovative Methods For Researching Leadership Emergence, Leanne Gibbs, Frances Press, Sandie Wong, Tamara Cumming

The Qualitative Report

There is a growing understanding, internationally, that effective leadership has an influence on the quality of early childhood education programs. The leadership research agenda has expanded accordingly but despite this expansion there is little empirical research on the emergence and development of leadership in early childhood education. The article focuses primarily on the methodological challenge of studying the phenomena of emerging and developing leadership. We describe the innovative methods for data generation that were used to address these challenges for an Australian study of leading within early childhood education sites. We explain in detail two of the methods—a field observation …