DEFINING AND ASSESSING PARENT EMPOWERMENT AND ITS RELATIONSHIP TO ACADEMIC ACHIEVEMENT USING THE NATIONAL HOUSEHOLD EDUCATION SURVEY: A FOCUS ON MARGINALIZED PARENTS

Abstract

Marginalized parents experience multiple and complex challenges in terms of social isolation, exclusion, and powerlessness. This empirical study investigated the effects of parent empowerment on academic outcomes using a large national representative sample and should provide insights about the importance of parent empowerment in education and counseling. Further, the study investigated the effect of the intersectionality of race/ethnicity, home language and income on parent empowerment. This first attempt at analyzing intersectionality in the context of parent empowerment may provide some guidance for future researchers in addressing the complex nature of intersecting identities. This study was a correlational study that used data from the Parent and Family Involvement Survey of the National Household Education Surveys (PFI-NHES: 2007) to investigate the relationship between parent empowerment and academic achievement as measured by parents' reports of students' grade point average(GPA). Using multiple linear regression and logistic regression, the findings of the current study demonstrated that some aspects of parent empowerment were related to children's academic achievement, namely, parents' competence, self-determination, community belonging, and community participation. Interestingly, parents' sense of meaning and consciousness were not related to children's academic achievement. Moreover, intersections of race/ethnicity, home language and income were also related to parent empowerment. The results are significant in that they provide empirical information for school counselors, teachers, administrators and counselors for working with parents. Furthermore, these data may begin to provide support for the conceptual framework of parent empowerment provided this study in order to guide future research and practice.