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Parental Involvement with Children at School, Home, and Community

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Abstract

Previous research has focused on examining the effects of parental involvement on children’s academic achievement. Less attention has been placed on exploring types of parental involvement from parental reports. This study combines in a single analytic framework predictors from earlier studies with parent-based reports of involvement in three venues: home, school, and community. We examine two categories of predictors: social and economic resources, and parent perceptions and experiences with child’s school. Using data from the Parent and Family Involvement Survey, analyses were performed for White, Black, and Latino parents. Consistent with previous findings, our research finds that minority parents are less involved at their child’s school than White parents. No ethnic differences in home or community involvement were found.

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Notes

  1. Although there is a 2007 Parent and Family Involvement Survey, there are fewer questions concerning school outreach and using the 2007 data may result in a weaker measure. In addition, some crucial variables of interest are not available in the 2007 dataset. Most of the other variables remain the same in both the 2003 and 2007 datasets; thus, the validity of the analytic model should be the same with either data set.

  2. The measure for reported household income had extensive missing data, so we used a quasi-continuous variable provided in the data. Although this variable has varying intervals, it gave us more information than would a simple dichotomous variable for income.

  3. According to Menard (2001), when dependent variables are ordinal, one option is to treat the variable as though it were continuous. He claims this is widely done, especially when the dependent variable has five or more categories. Because the results from ordinal logistic models were so similar to those obtained by using OLS regression, we decided to present OLS results, as they are more easily understood (Menard 2001). The ordinal logistic results are available upon request.

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Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to Richard Hogan and John Stahura for their helpful comments on earlier drafts.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Criminal Justice Studies, University of Southern Indiana, 8600 University Boulevard, Evansville, IN, 47712, USA

    Melissa J. Stacer

  2. Department of Sociology, Purdue Unviersity, 700 W. State Street, West Lafayette, IN, 47907, USA

    Robert Perrucci

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Correspondence to Melissa J. Stacer.

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Stacer, M.J., Perrucci, R. Parental Involvement with Children at School, Home, and Community. J Fam Econ Iss 34, 340–354 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10834-012-9335-y

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