Marissa Horning

English 102
Meissner
April 26, 2019

Primary Research Analysis

Introduction
The purpose of my research is to discover reasons that beginning teachers leave the
profession and also devise solutions that administrators of schools can implement to reduce the
effect of these challenges. This research is important and necessary because of all the negative
effects that can result from teachers leaving the profession. High among these effects is the
possibility that students’ education could suffer from a high teacher turnover rate. I have gone
about my research inductively, collecting information through surveys and data about teacher
retention rates in the Olympia district before coming to my conclusions. However, in my
surveys, I have used some deductive strategies. These include previously researching reasons
that teachers leave the profession and asking the survey participants about these specific reasons
and asking them to give additional responses to increase my list of factors.

Research Questions
Results
The screenshots on the left and on the next few pages have been taken from the most
recent analysis of my “teacher survey” results. The bar graphs in the first five screenshots show
what percentage of responders indicated the importance of certain factors affecting their
employment.
The next screenshot shows the differing responses that the audience wrote citing other factors
they consider when making employment decisions. The final screenshot is a graph demonstrating
the percentage of responders who considered the various factors to be under the purview of their
schools’ administration.
The next set of screenshots have been taken from the survey sent to administrators.
Analysis
These results are important to my project because they showcase genuine opinions and
feelings from teachers in the area that I am trying to study for my project. The results speak to
what teachers feel are the most important things they consider when choosing a place of
employment, and changes in these factors can cause issues with teacher retention. I was very
pleased with the number of responses that I received from the teacher survey, especially because
of the short amount of time the survey was available. This was not necessarily the case in terms
of the other survey I sent to the administration of the schools in the Olympia district. However, I
believe there were other factors that affected the amount of responses to that survey, which I will
discuss in the reflection.
I was surprised by the amount of alternate factors that the responders wrote in the sixth
question of the teacher survey. I obviously did not think that I had addressed every single factor
that could influence teachers, but I was interested in the responses that the teachers gave me.
Many of the alternate reasons given were similar to each other, and some of the most common
answers were location of the school and support from both the community and administration. I
did not expect so many of the responders to give me alternate factors, and I will be including
those additional responses in my final project. In terms of the administration survey, I was
surprised by the fact that most teachers cite location and personal issues as their cause for
changing jobs. Before taking the results from the teacher survey, I did not recognize that job
location and proximity to home was such a major issue for teachers.
 I did expect many of the teachers to indicate that financial factors and personal issues
were the factors that impacted them the most in their employment decisions, and that proved
true. On a one to five scale of “not important” to “extremely important,” fifty percent of teachers
give financial factors a four, and sixty percent of teachers gave personal issues a five.

Reflection
If I were to do this research again, I would probably update the administration survey
more than the teacher survey, because of the huge lack of responses that I received compared to
the teacher survey. The main difference between the two surveys was that the administration
survey was composed mainly of short and long answer question, whereas the teacher survey
could be completed more quickly because of the simplicity of the questions. The reason I chose
to make the administration survey questions more open-ended is because I was less sure about
how they would respond to my questions. In the teacher survey, the questions were more
conducive to having multiple choice answers than were the questions in the administration
survey. If I were to recreate the administration survey, I would try to make more of the questions
multiple choice so as to hopefully increase the amount of responses I receive.
I think that my teacher survey went over very well - I received several compliments from
teachers about its professionalism and question quality. I also received over thirty-five responses,
and the results seemed fairly consistent with each other, with little to no outliers due to question
error. The survey was also effective in getting extra responses from the subjects in the form of
additional responses to the final question.