Predictors of parent involvement in children's schooling.

Abstract

Parents' involvement in their children's schooling is associated with children's school success, with the positive effects of parent involvement having now been demonstrated across a wide range of age levels and populations (e.g., Epstein, 1983; Fehrmann, Keith, & Reimers, 1987; Reynolds, 1989; Stevenson & Baker, 1987). Researchers know less, however, about the factors that determine how involved parents become. Understanding such factors should assist in developing interventions to increase parent involvement in all families. To date, the focus of most work on predictors of parent involvement has been demographic factors. For example, lower income, less educated (Hoover-Dempsey, Bassler, & Brissie, 1987; Lareau, 1987), and single parents (Epstein, 1990b) are less involved than are more educated, higher income, or married parents. However, little work has gone beyond the social address (Bronfenbrenner, 1986) model to explain how such factors affect involvement. Further, the majority of studies on this issue have used narrow, unidimensional measures of parent involvement that don't take into account the diverse ways in which parents can be involved (Auerbach, 1989). In this study, we add to the literature by using a multilevel model of intra- and extrafamilial factors that might influence multiple facets of parent involvement.