Assessing principals' interpersonal behaviour

In the past 25 years much attention has been given to the development and use of instruments to assess the qualities of the classroom and school environment from the perspectives of students and teachers. This paper describes the development and validation of an instrument, the Principal Interaction Questionnaire, to measure principals' interpersonal behaviour in a school. The instrument was based on the Questionnaire on Teacher Interaction, which was first devised in The Netherlands and contains eight scales of measurement such as Leadership and Understanding. The questionnaire was sent to 60 schools throughout Australia where it was completed by the principal and a random sample of 20 teachers in each school. The results obtained were analysed to give measures of interpersonal behaviour of principals as perceived by themselves and their teachers.