The Relationship Between Social Justice Leadership in Education and School Belonging: Canonical Correlation Analysis

Abstract

The purpose of this research was to examine the relationship between the high school students' perceptions of their school principals' social justice leadership and their sense of school belonging. The sample of the research consists of 264 students studying at high schools in Denizli and Manisa, two medium-sized cities in the Aegean Region. “Social Justice Leadership Scale (SJLS)” developed by Özdemir and Kütküt (2015) and “School Belonging Scale (SBS)” developed by Goodenow (1993) and adapted into Turkish by Sarı (2013) were used for data collection. As a result of the research, which employs the correlational survey model, it was determined that high school students felt a moderate level of school belonging and had a moderate perception of school principals' social justice leadership. As a result of the canonical correlation analysis, it was determined that the school belonging, and social justice leadership data sets shared a variance of approximately 60%. It has been determined that there is a positive relationship between the variables of support, participation and critical consciousness in the social justice leadership data set and the sense of belonging and sense of rejection variables in the sense of school belonging data set.