| Susan Stone
University of Chicago
Understanding adolescent, family, and school determinants of changes in parental involvement between 8th and 10th grades: Evidence from the Student Life in High Schools Project and the NELS:88.
FINAL REPORT:
This dissertation takes an intensive look at the way school-level policies and practices influence changes in parent involvement as students move into high school. It uses data from the base year (8th grade) and first follow-up (tenth grade) student, teacher, and school administrator surveys from the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988 (NELS). The primary goal is to move beyond cross-sectional studies to determine how characteristics of schools account for changes in parent involvement. This dissertation will derive measures of change in parental involvement from students reports and will use Hierarchical Linear Modeling (HLM) techniques to identify how much of such changes can be attributed to student, family and school characteristics. This dissertation takes a further step to link findings from the NELS to those from The Student Life in High Schools Project (SLP), an intensive qualitative longitudinal study of 98 students and parents in three Chicago public high schools. Research suggests that parent involvement in schooling drops off dramatically as students move into high school. By innovatively combining qualitative and quantitative longitudinal data sources, this dissertation attempts to account for these changes and ultimately inform the question of how high schools-- especially urban high schools-- can better target and support parental involvement to promote adolescent school success.
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