ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses a variety of assumptions that education researchers make when they convert data on principals' time use into measures of scientific constructs and then report descriptive statistics on these measures. As I demonstrate below, researchers have made many and varied assumptions about what they are measuring when they use time-use data in studies of principals. Some of these assumptions have been theoretical in nature and are about the scientific constructs ostensibly being measured with time-use data. Other assumptions are about the methods used to collect time-use data and the mathematical procedures used to turn time-use data into measures of these scientific constructs. Still other assumptions are about the replicability and generality of descriptive findings about principals' time use. The goals of this chapter are to surface these assumptions about principals' time-use measures, to critique and evaluate these assumptions, and to make some modest suggestions about how these assumptions can be clarified and investigated in future research.
