Hispanic parental involvement in education: An ecological framework

Abstract

This study examines the demographic and school factors affecting parental involvement in children's education among Hispanic families and the relationship between parental involvement in children's education and academic success. The interrelationship of these factors has been addressed by using an ecological framework. The study is a secondary analysis of existing data, drawn from the National Household Education Survey, 1996, originally conducted by the United States Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics (1998). The sample for this study consists of 2230 self-reported Hispanic parents with children in the 1st--12th grade.;A model based on Bronfenbrenner's (1976) ecological framework was developed in order to test the research questions and hypotheses of the study. The variables of the study were broken down into systems representative of the child. Ordinal regressions were conducted in order to determine whether any given subsystem is more important than another in predicting the child's academic achievement and to identify which variables within a given subsystem were most important.;All three models developed for the study demonstrated that the most significant factors affecting parental involvement, parent perception, and child's academic achievement were parents having higher levels of education, higher socioeconomic status of the family, child's attendance at private school and the school's parental involvement efforts. Of particular interest was that parental involvement dropped out as an important predictor of child academic achievement in the final model.;This study provides support for the use of ecological theory in school social work. The models developed for this study demonstrate how, as the components of the child's system interact with one another, some become more predictive of the others. No single factor was found to be the most important factor in the child's academic achievement. It was found that the child's success in school is dependent on a number of factors that together contribute to his/her achievement.