Say phenomenological three times... fast!

Hypothetically speaking of course, if I were to decide to pursue a qualitative study of teacher organizational citizenship behaviors and pay-for-performance incentives, I could do either a phenomenological or an ethnographic study. The chosen approach would depend on whether I focused on just the identification and existence of extra-role behaviors and a shared cooperative culture of teachers (ethnography) or on their experiences as they relate and react to the implementation of an incentive pay system (phenomenological study ). Or perhaps I could accomplish both!

In the case of an ethnography, I would start with a foreshadowed problem generated from the active debate within existing research and theory about the existence and definition of teacher organizational citizenship behaviors. I might choose to focus my study on high school teachers and then enter into a relationship with a particular high school in a particular district for the express purpose of sampling, observing, obtaining and analyzing data about the behaviors outside of those required by formal teacher job descriptions. I would seek to identify a pattern from these observations and data about why, how, when and for whom teachers express OCB.

Backing up to review individual aspects of an ethnography, in that I cannot possibly study the extra-role behaviors of a comprehensive sample of high school teachers across the U.S., or even likely all teachers in a particular district, I would have to engage with a purposeful sample by case of teachers in one or two particular high schools. To protect validity and support any efforts at generalizability , I would need to identify all of the subject/selection threats that were inherent in the demographics of the district and school with which I chose to engage.

To obtain data, I would work as a moderate participant to record comprehensive observations, both structured and unstructured. I would also arrange to observe applicable committee and team meetings as well as ask questions about behaviors that I do observe. Interviews would also be very important to my study so that I could engage individual teachers in conversation about their behaviors and their own observations of others’ behavior. I foresee that document reviews would be valuable in that I could review the job descriptions and performance evaluations of the teachers to ensure that I could accurately differentiate what was in-role versus extra-role behavior and expectations.

A separate, additional phenomenological study might also be intriguing in that I could then build a further understanding of teacher OCB as it is influenced by the implementation or existence of incentive pay schemes. It would be very cool to query teachers through in-depth interviews or focus groups about their observations, reactions, and feelings (drama!) about pay-for-performance. If I was then able to interpret the data with any significant measure of reliability, I could hope to build new understanding about the use of incentive pay for teachers. Insight on how teachers experience pay –for-performance vis a vis the behaviors that they report being incentivized or discouraged would be very valuable feedback to have when considering the design of future teacher compensation systems.

Outside of this particular research problem relating to teacher behavior, I think a phenomenological study of pay-for-performance in any corporate environment could be extremely meaningful. There are a plethora of reports and studies that pay-for-performance is ineffective, broken, and not worthwhile but I don’t recall seeing any that try to derive meaning about pay-for-performance systems based on a qualitative investigation of participant experiences with it.