Spirituality, Leadership and Narrative Identity in Dutch Catholic Secondary Schools

This qualitative, explorative study seeks to broaden the scope of normativity in collaborative decision-making in Dutch Catholic school management teams beyond ethical reasoning by the inclusion of reasons that relate to a vision of good education. It introduces the concept of ‘discernment’ as a heuristic for the description of the content and process of decision-making, and thus positions the weighing of reasons with reference to the good at the heart of decision-making. Also it explores other modes than normative modes of reasoning in collaborative decision-making in school management teams. The data were collected through focus group discussions (2 groups) and half-structured interviews (6 respondents). The data were subjected to deductive coding, assigning theory-based codes to data segments. This coding method was completed with inductive coding, introducing new codes when the pre-given codes did not match or qualify certain data segments properly. The data set includes the following files: a readme file that explains the data set, the anonymised data (Atlas.ti files, a XML export and PdfA files of the interviews), the codebook that describes the data, an interview protocol (for the interviews) and the topics lists (for the focus group discussions).