The Network Structure of School Principal Resilience: Gender Differences

Abstract

The ability of school principals to demonstrate resilience enables them to effectively lead, adapt and thrive amidst the ever‐changing landscape of educational challenges and transformations. Despite its necessity, research on principal resilience remains largely underdeveloped and is still in its early stages. The current study aims to fill this gap using network analysis to examine the inter‐structural principal resilience network and gender differences in terms of network estimation, centrality indices, network stability and network comparison using a sample of 1274 principals from China. The results reveal a comprehensive understanding of the dynamic network and gender effects on school principal resilience at the dimension and item levels. It is noted that social resilience exhibits the highest strength, indicating the critical importance of social support networks and relationships. The gender analysis indicated that spiritual resilience emerged as a central dimension in the resilience network of female principals, while emotional and psychological resilience was the central dimension in the resilience network of male principals. This study advances the conceptual and practical understandings of school principal resilience by examining the interactions among different dimensions and items, thereby contributing to the maturity of knowledge production and intervention efforts in the field.