Yes.

As soon as you submit your survey you are automatically directed to your own wellbeing report. There you can see how you are going compared to other principals and compared to the general population.

Please note that when you complete the survey you will be asked to choose a unique password that will always allow you to login and access your report. Your "confirmation of submission" email will contain the link to access the report tool as well as your username and password. Do save it!

If you're completing a Year 1 survey it should take no longer than one hour to finish all together.

If you're completing a repeat survey and you're still at the same school in the same role, then the survey should take 30-40 minutes to complete.

But remember, we don't expect you to complete it in one sitting. Your entry link allows you to come and go from the survey as you please, and your answers are saved each time you press the 'Next' button.

In the first version we are collecting all the baseline data, which includes a lot of demographic information. We've used two gold standard questionnaires to assess psychosocial health, wellbeing and quality of life and they are both comprehensive questionnaires. We are using all this information to create as big a picture as we can and so we can compare your results to global results.

When you do the survey you press a 'Next' button to get from page to page. Every time you press this button your responses are sent to the central database and saved.

You can pop in and out as often as you like to complete the survey in small chunks, or you can do the whole thing in one sitting.

The entry link you received in your registration email will get you back into the survey at the last page you completed.

If this doesn't work, please email Aimee Maxwell and she will send you a new entry link.

Please email Aimee Maxwell and she will send you a new entry link.

Yes.

Yes.

You have been emailed about the survey in one of two ways:

1. Email from a principals association or education union

The survey launch has been supported by every branch of the AEU and the IEU, and by almost every principals association in Australia. At our request, these organisations emailed information about the survey to their principal class members. These organisations DID NOT share your email address with us. When you complete the survey for the first time, you will be asked to provide an email address, which we will keep on record and use to contact you annually.

OR

2. Email to your publically available school email address

A small percentage of principals are not represented by any of the principals associations which supported the survey launch. We contacted these principals directly using email addresses which appear on their school websites. In most cases, we emailed the survey invitation to the school office email address, with a request to pass the survey information on to all principals, assistant and deputy principals in the school. A small number of principals were sent emails directly to the principal’s email address which was available on their school website.

Your email address will be treated as confidential personal information and will be used only to contact you about the survey. It will never be shared or made publicly available in any way.

This is a longitudinal study. We will be contacting you in future years to ask you to complete annual updates of the survey. We ask for your phone number as a secondary means of contacting you if your email address changes. If we are unable to contact you using the email address provided, we may phone or message you a reminder about the annual updates of the survey.

Your phone number will be treated as confidential personal information and will be used only to contact you about the survey. It will not be shared or made publicly available in any way.

If we are unable to contact you using the email address or phone number you provide, we may contact you through your alternative contact person. This person will be asked to pass on the project manager's email address and phone number for you to make contact.

No personal information or survey data will ever be shared with this person.

The alternative contact person’s details are treated as confidential personal information and will be used only to contact you about the survey if we are unable to contact you directly. The person’s details will not be shared or made publicly available in any way.

If you really don't want to supply someone else's details, you can enter alternate details for yourself.

The survey is collecting data about your quality of life and psychosocial job stress along with the demographics of your school.

The information we collect will be used to inform policy makers about real costs and benefits of being in leadership roles. We hope to help change governmental and training policies to better support principals.

Completely. Your data is not accessible to anyone but the primary researchers and is de-identified before any analysis.

We will be publishing articles in educational and policy journals as well as writing reports for industry bodies, organisations, employers and policy makers.

All reports are freely downloadable from our website. Select the Reports tab on top of this page.

All data is stored in our secure servers in password protected and encrypted files.

Only the primary researchers are able to access the data. Raw, identifiable data will never be available to anyone.

We are interested in the characteristics of your school such as enrolment numbers, staff numbers and the socioeconomic status of your school community. We ask you to provide the name of your school, so that we can access publicly available information about your school.

Your school name is treated as confidential information and will not be shared in any way. No school will ever be named in any reporting of results.

The survey is run by a team of researchers in Melbourne, Australia led by Associate Professor Philip Riley.
The survey is conducted independently of all employers groups, professional associations and unions. It has full ethics approval and adheres to all University guidelines.

The research team sought the support of principals association to assist us with promoting the survey and emailing information about the survey out to their members.

The survey has received strong support from principals associations and education unions around Australia because these organisations believe this to be an important piece of research. Principals associations have given assistance to the survey voluntarily.

The Copenhagen Psychosocial Questionnaire is an instrument that has been used globally to measure work stress in many occupations. You can read more about it here and here. Here is a copy of the questions asked.

The AQoL-8D is a health-related quality of life instrument developed by researchers at the Centre for Health Economics at Monash University. You can read more about it here.

We are using these questionnaires as they have been demonstrated to be reliable and valid tools. Using the COPSOQ II will allow us to look at your job stress and psychosocial health and compare it to a global dataset. Using the AQoL-8D will allow us to compare your quality of life against Australian norms.

While completing the survey you can email Aimee Maxwell and request that your information be deleted.

After you have submitted your survey, you can email at any time and request that your data be deleted.