Making sense of the parental influence and involvement of first-year students

Abstract

Over the past ten years, colleges have experienced an influx of parental involvement. Institutions inherit a population of students that have never functioned without the input of their parents and once enrolled, welcome the same level of involvement. Though faculty and administrators perceive the level of parental involvement as encumbering, empirical evidence capturing the perspective of first-year college students is missing. This study employed an interpretive phenomenological analysis (IPA) to investigate the influence parental involvement has on first-year of college students' social and academic integration. Guided by the following research question: How do first-year college students make sense of their parents' involvement in their academic and social life? Through qualitative inquiry, this study employed semi-structured interview questions to uncover how first-year college students make sense of their parents' involvement in their academic and social life. The three superordinate themes emerged from the analysis of narratives including 1) Involvement in Everything, 2) Importance of Involvement and 3) Young Adult. The findings in this study offer another perspective towards the phenomena of parental involvement, demonstrate that parental involvement is multidimensional and uncover both the positive and negative outcomes to parental involvement.