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Low-Income Urban African American and Latino Parents’ School Involvement: Testing a Theoretical Model

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Abstract

This exploratory study investigated whether: (a) the three process variables (role construction, sense of efficacy, and sense of being invited) in Hoover-Dempsey and Sandler’s model of parental school involvement provide unique contributions to explain parental involvement among African American and Latino immigrant parents, (b) there are significant differences in parental involvement between these groups, and (c) these process variables mediate the effect of status variables on involvement practices. Only perceptions of teachers’ invitations consistently predicted parents’ involvement practices. Latino immigrant parents obtained lower at-home, at-school, and total involvement practices scores and lower scores on perceptions of being invited by teachers than African Americans. The effects of annual income and race/ethnicity on parental practices were mediated by perceptions of teacher invitations. Data suggested the need to distinguish between at-home and at-school parental involvement.

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Notes

  1. This same analyses were run using HDS Total role construction, instead of the three subtypes, and the results did not change.

  2. Post-hoc analysis suggest that this negative relationship between parents’ income, involvement practices, and perceptions of teachers’ invitations appears to be isolated to the African American parent subsample.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychiatry (M/C 747), Institute for Juvenile Research, University of Illinois at Chicago, 1747 West Roosevelt, Room 155, Chicago, IL, 60608, USA

    Ané M. Maríñez-Lora

  2. Department of Counseling Psychology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 321 Education Building, 1000 Bascom Mall, Madison, WI, 53706, USA

    Stephen M. Quintana

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  1. Ané M. Maríñez-Lora
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  2. Stephen M. Quintana
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Correspondence to Ané M. Maríñez-Lora.

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An earlier version of this article was presented at a symposium at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association in Chicago, IL, April 2003.

This Study was conducted while the first author was a doctoral candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, WI.

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Maríñez-Lora, A.M., Quintana, S.M. Low-Income Urban African American and Latino Parents’ School Involvement: Testing a Theoretical Model. School Mental Health 1, 212–228 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12310-009-9015-8

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