Are Parents Satisfied with Early Childhood Education Service in Urban China?Empirical Evidence from the Validation Study of the Parent Satisfaction withEducational Experiences Scale

Abstract

ABSTRACTResearch Findings: This study aims to validate the Parent Satisfaction with Education Experiences Scale (PSEE) and to explore parental satisfaction with early childhood education service in urban China. Altogether 27,515 Chinese parents who were randomly sampled from 12 cities of China completed the survey. First, the exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses yielded the three-factor construct that was identical to the original American one, indicating a satisfactory construct validity, and the internal consistency is also satisfactory. Second, descriptive statistics found that Chinese parents had the highest satisfaction with the classroom contact experience, followed by teacher contact experience, and school contact experience, and the MANOVA analysis revealed a significant difference for kindergarten type. Third, two-step clustering analysis generated three parental profiles: (1) Low Satisfaction Parents; (2) Medium Satisfaction Parents; and (3) High satisfaction Parents. Practice or Policy: The findings of Chinese parent satisfaction towards different types of kindergartens indicated that more efforts should be made to promote equity, equality, and social justice in the field of early childhood education. And the ‘universal and low-cost private’ kindergartens policy should be reviewed and improved accordingly.