Educational Leadership Research

Abstract The present study aimed to analyze the ethical foundations of monitoring students' virtual activities. This research is developmental-applied in nature and was conducted using a sequential exploratory mixed-methods approach. In the qualitative phase, 22 school principals and university faculty members with expertise in virtual education monitoring were selected through snowball sampling until theoretical saturation was reached. In the quantitative phase, the statistical population included elementary and secondary school principals in Bukan, from which 120 participants were selected using Morgan’s sampling table and random sampling. Data from the qualitative phase were collected through semi-structured interviews and analyzed using thematic analysis (theme, category, and concept coding). The credibility of the qualitative findings was assessed based on Guba and Lincoln’s (2000) criteria: credibility, transferability, dependability, and confirmability. Inter-coder agreement was also used to evaluate the reliability of the interview protocol. In the quantitative phase, structural equation modeling was employed. All reliability coefficients exceeded 0.70 based on Cronbach’s alpha, and both convergent and divergent validities were confirmed. The findings revealed that principals’ monitoring of students’ virtual activities is grounded in three main ethical dimensions: individual ethics of students, social ethics, and spiritual-Islamic ethical identifiers. These were further organized into nine key categories and forty components. Based on these findings, a conceptual framework was developed encompassing nine overarching themes: character education, classroom ethical identifiers, individual ethics in cyberspace, students’ educational content, teacher-student relationships, family monitoring, educational evaluation, Islamic ethics, and spiritual ethics. According to expert review, the proposed framework demonstrates strong validity and a satisfactory model fit.