“ Involved Is an Interesting Word”: An Empirical Case for Redefining School-Based Parental Involvement as Parental Efficacy

Benjamin G. Gibbs, Miles Marsala, Ashley Gibby, Miriam Clark, Craig Alder, Bryce Hurst, Dustin Steinacker and Brent Hutchison
Additional contact information
Benjamin G. Gibbs: Department of Sociology, Brigham Young University, Provo, UT 84602, USA
Miles Marsala: Palm Beach State College, Palm Beach Gardens, FL 33410, USA
Ashley Gibby: School of Family Life, Brigham Young University, Provo, UT 84602, USA
Miriam Clark: Prevention Science, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR 97403, USA
Craig Alder: Unaffiliated, New York City, NY 10458, USA
Bryce Hurst: Independent Researcher, Philadelphia, PA 19148, USA
Dustin Steinacker: Utah Department of Human Services, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, USA
Brent Hutchison: Community Action Services and Food Bank, Provo, UT 84601, USA

Social Sciences, 2021, vol. 10, issue 5, 1-21

Abstract: School-based parental involvement is a common practice in the United States, and yet there is an emerging view that parents’ involvement in schools may have little if any academic benefit for their children. However, such conclusions are often based on narrowly construed survey questions, such as “Did you attend PTA in the past year?”. In our study, we re-examine commonly used measurements of school-based parental involvement using 130 interviews with parents and administrators across three diverse elementary schools. We compare conventional survey measures of school-based parental involvement with our own qualitative assessments of parental efficacy. Notably, we find that highly efficacious parents employed a wide range of involvement strategies, undetected by some traditional metrics of involvement (i.e., attending PTA meetings). As expected, we also find that efficacious parents were largely advantaged themselves and concentrated in advantaged schools. However, school contexts can play a powerful role in shaping the reception of parents’ engagement with schools—the presence of a Spanish immersion program transformed how teachers and administrators interpreted the involvement activities of Latinx parents. Our results point to the importance of (1) recasting parental involvement as parental efficacy and (2) integrating school contexts to understand how efficacy can be more effectively encouraged and deployed.

Keywords: school-based parental involvement; parenting; elementary schools (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A B N P Y80 Z00 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0760/10/5/156/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0760/10/5/156/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jscscx:v:10:y:2021:i:5:p:156-:d:545843

Access Statistics for this article

Social Sciences is currently edited by Ms. Yvonne Chu

More articles in Social Sciences from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().