Investigation of school principals' counseling relationships and leadership processes with social network analysis

The aim of the research is to reveal leaders who have an important place and influence in conseling networks as well as the characteristics and power sources that drive these actors to leadership positions. For this reason, the study was designed as a multiple case study, one of the qualitative research methods that allows multidimensional investigation. It can be said that this is an example of qualitative research as part of the school principals' views on the problems they encounter, the reasons for the counseling relationships, the effectiveness in solving problems and the leadership processes, and the quantitative analysis of the centrality, frequency etc. and structural characteristics of the counseling network. The working group consists of 38 secondary school principals working in the city center of Siirt and its villages. In addition, 13 managers who were branch managers or deputy provincial directors in Siirt Provincial Directorate of National Education were passively included in the study. The data regarding the social network analysis of the study were analyzed in the UCINET 6 program, and the qualitative data were analyzed with the content analysis technique. As a result of the study it was determined that school principals consult the provincial administrators more frequently and the advices of school principals from their counterparts are more effective in terms of solutions to problems. In the results of the social network analysis, it was seen that the variables of education level and union membership were effective in the counseling relations of the school principals in the consultation network with their counterparts. The variables of education level and union membership were also affected by the attraction of homophily and created a significant difference in relationships. In the general counseling network of school principals, it was concluded that the relationship between the school where the school principals work and the administrator of the unit responsible for these schools is effective in the counseling network and that the homophily is affected by the attraction. In addition, it has been concluded that the school principals consultation network has multi-faceted leaders who are fed by many powers, as well as leaders formed by the bureaucratic structure. In the light of the results obtained from the study it is suggested that: creating opportunities to support social network analysis studies and adding such studies to education vision studies, thus obtaining data-driven insights about the strengths and weaknesses of schools and opportunities for improvement; examining the counseling networks in the school, observing the distribution of power and power resources in order to intervene in negative situations that may be encountered in the school or in the teaching process; analyzing the structure of the counseling networks in schools and the characteristics of the leaders emerging in these networks and their effects on school culture and student achievement and the creation of new structures that will encourage postgraduate education.