Rapport with Principal was most closely associated with this study because it addresses
professional competency, interest in teachers and their work, the ability to communicate,
and skills in human relations. The PTO was designed to measure teacher satisfaction and
morale and was deemed to have high validity by the authors. Therefore I assumed the
instrument had content validity for the purposes of my study, as my study also measures
teacher morale. Bentley and Rempel (1980) established reliability when they performed a
test-retest reliability measure and found the scores to be correlated with a reliability
coefficient of .87. Although this survey was written in 1980, the language is consistent with
current educational jargon. I obtained permission to use this survey in writing from the
authors (Appendix D).
In my study, I used the questions from the Encourage the Heart portion of the
LPI (Kouzes & Posner 2002) and questions from the Teacher Rapport portion of the
PTO (Bentley & Rempel, 1980) to develop themes prior to gathering data. After
reviewing various interview instruments including the LPI and PTO, along with
questions I developed for a Walden University qualitative research class, I created a list
of personal interview questions to be used in the study.