Global Patterns of Parental Concerns About Children’s Education: Insights from WVS Data

Daniel Homocianu ()
Additional contact information
Daniel Homocianu: Department of Accounting, Business Information Systems and Statistics, Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, Alexandru Ioan Cuza University, 700505 Jassy, Romania

Societies, 2025, vol. 15, issue 2, 1-47

Abstract: Parental concerns about the education of children usually reflect deep-seated anxieties. This study identifies the most influential factors shaping these global concerns based on World Values Survey (WVS) data spanning several decades. Using advanced techniques, including feature selection (Adaptive and Gradient Boosting, Pairwise Correlations, LASSO, Bayesian Model Averaging), mixed-effects modeling, cross-validation procedures, different regressions and overfitting, collinearity, and reverse causality checks together with two-way graphical representations, this study identified three enduring predictors: fear of job loss, fear of war, and respondent age. These findings mainly underline the role of socio-economic and geopolitical stability and security and, in addition, that of generational perspectives in shaping global parental priorities. All three predictors were consistent across seven dataset versions, various subsets considering random (ten-folds) or non-random criteria (different values for socio-demographic variables in mixed-effects models), and distinct feature selection approaches. Secondary influences, including opinions regarding the priority of work in life, other fears, and socio-demographic variables (e.g., gender, number of children, marital and professional status, income, education level, community size, etc.) provided more nuances to this study and additional explanatory power. The findings have implications for designing socio-economically sensitive educational policies that address parental priorities and anxieties in diverse global contexts.

Keywords: parental concerns; children’s education; predictors of concerns; attitudes towards work; education policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A13 A14 P P0 P1 P2 P3 P4 P5 Z1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2075-4698/15/2/30/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2075-4698/15/2/30/ (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:jsoctx:v:15:y:2025:i:2:p:30-:d:1584374

Access Statistics for this article

Societies is currently edited by Ms. Farrah Sun

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