Parents’ educational involvement: Types of resources and forms of involvement in four countries

Abstract

Parents’ involvement in schooling and education is highly important for children’s results. Still, both levels of involvement and their effects vary according to social class. Previous research on educational reproduction within the family has, however, largely studied differences between the middle and the working class, and generally ignored differences in the composition of cultural and economic capital. In this article, we aim to fill this gap in the literature by separating cultural and economic resources and investigate their correlation with two kinds of parental involvement in four different European countries. Results show that parents with more cultural resources are more likely to be involved by having future educational expectations, and parents with more economic resources are more likely to be involved in their children’s current schooling (e.g. help with homework) than those with more cultural resources. The association between economic resources and involvement in educational expectations is however stronger in Spain and Iceland than in Belgium and Norway, suggesting an influence from system‐level features as well as general economic trends.