Barriers to parent involvement in middle school health education

American Journal of Health Studies, Fall, 2000 by Scott D. Winnail, Brian F. Geiger, David M. Macrina, Scott Snyder, Cynthia J. Petri, Stephen Nagy

METHODS

LOCATION AND INSTRUMENTATION

Two middle schools in a suburban Southeastern school district cooperated in this study. Approval was obtained from the district superintendent and subsequently the principals of both middle schools. School principals acted as primary liaisons between the researcher and the school district. They also responded directly to parent questions and inquiries regarding this study, acted as reviewers for draft surveys, and helped with the logistics of implementing the study. The school district was upper-middle class and predominantly white, although growing rapidly with ethnic diversity. Both middle schools had in place an actively used health education curriculum. The study was completed during the Spring of 1998.

A qualitative pilot study was initially conducted with middle school parents in order to identify primary barriers to parent involvement in health education. PRECEDE (Green & Kreuter, 1999) constructs of predisposing, reinforcing, and enabling factors and Health Belief Model (Strecher & Rosenstock, 1997) constructs of perceived threats, perceived barriers, perceived enablers, self-efficacy, and cues to action were used to inform the development of focus group and telephone interview questions. A convenience sample of parents self-selected to participate in two focus groups (N=13, mostly White females). In order to counter a potentially biased sample of focus group participants (already highly involved), random telephone interviews were conducted with middle school parents screening out the highly involved parents.

A 53-item mail-out questionnaire was developed from pilot study results. This parent questionnaire was primarily fixed response driven, with three open-ended questions. The questionnaire contained six major sections: 1) information about their children, 2) feedback on the most important subjects in school and most important health education topics, 3) information on personal history of family involvement, 4) perceived barriers to parent involvement, 5) perceived enablers to parent involvement, and 6) demographic information.

Pilot testing of the mail-out questionnaire and expert panel review preceded the final random mailing to 500 households (25% of total middle school households). Parents, teachers, principals and state and nationally recognized experts reviewed the survey for face validity and readability. The instrument reading level was determined to be grade 12. Surveys were coded for tracking purposes and mailed. Households that did not return surveys in a ten days were contacted by telephone and were encouraged to either return the survey in the mail or complete the survey over the telephone.

Parents received advance notice of the surveys from two weeks to one month prior to the mailing of surveys. Each school ran a short informational note in their school parent newsletter, encouraging parents to expect a survey in the mail and to participate by completing and returning the survey. Mailings were addressed to the parents of middle school students and contained a cover letter on school letterhead, survey, and a stamped return envelope. Parents were asked to complete and return the surveys within the next one to two days. Parents were also informed that they might receive a telephone call in the next week to verify that they had indeed returned the survey.