Approaches to studying the relationships between stress and school organizational sources of stress were examined. Rather than sampling a number of schools and school average data indicating school health and stress levels in these schools, simple teacher samples and teacher-level analyses were used. For a sample of 1300 high school teachers in Connecticut, the correlation values obtained using teacher scores on measures of burnout, need satisfaction, and school characteristics were compared with the values obtained from school mean data on the same variables from the same data set. The results indicated that the methodology did matter, and that correlation values obtained directly from teacher scores were not indicative of the role of school organizations in teacher stress. Although the evidence supported the presence of organizational sources of teachers' distress, it is suggested that they were not as important as role-related or individual sources of distress. (GDC)