1988-89 TFS Methods and Procedures

The Teacher Follow-up Survey (TFS) consisted of two questionnaires, one for current teachers and one for former teachers. The TFS was designed to measure attrition rates and to compare teachers who left the teaching profession, teachers who moved to another school and those who stayed in the same school as the previous year. TFS also measures the current economic activities of leavers and obtains data on educational activities and future plans for all groups; and to collect data on attitudes about the teaching profession and job satisfaction.

The TFS sampling frame consisted of all eligible teachers who responded to the SASS Teacher Survey in the previous year.

A primary sample design objective for the TFS was to support comparative analyses of stayers, movers and leavers for teachers classified by sector (public and private), level (elementary and secondary) and years in teaching (new and experienced). The majority of teachers in all categories were stayers. Movers and leavers were oversampled in order to reduce the sampling errors of estimated differences among groups.

In late summer 1989, letters were sent to the school districts that participated in the SASS. School principals were then asked to complete a Teacher Status Form to identify which of the teachers who had completed the Teacher Survey were still employed at the school, which teachers had moved to another school and which teachers had left the school for a non-teaching occupation. The appropriate questionnaire was then sent to the sampled teachers' home addresses. In preparation for the mailing, in the previous year, the SASS Teacher Questionnaire asked for the teacher's home address and contact information for two people who would know the teacher's whereabouts.

Data processing for the TFS was a multi-stage procedure. The main steps were a general clerical edit to check for out of range values, data keying, computer pre-edit, a review and correction of rejects from the computer pre-edit, a computer edit and the assignment of a final status to the questionnaire. Inter-item consistency was also checked and items were blanked when respondents answered questions unnecessarily because they did not follow the skip instructions correctly.

There was no imputation of missing items for the 1988-89 TFS. Missing values were left blank, treated as zeros. As a result, estimates of totals were generally underestimated. The data were imputed years later when the file was included on the three-cycle SASS and TFS CD-ROM (NCES 98312).

A ratio adjustment was made that forced the weighted sample counts from the TFS to conform to the weighted number of teachers from SASS.

Weighted response rates are defined as the number of in-scope responding questionnaires divided by the number of in-scope sample cases, using the basic weight (inverse of the probability of selection) of the record.

Reinterviews were conducted to obtain some indication of measurement error. Questionnaires were mailed to the reinterview sample, which consisted of 1,500 teachers, half of them were currently teaching, half of them were former teachers.

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