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

Birch and Hallock (1999) discovered that the primary modes of middle school parent involvement in a Mid-west state were serving on health curriculum committees and involvement on text book committees. These committees typically require only a few parents to participate. For those few parents, they are tied in closely with the educational process, but for the vast majority of others, their link to service with academic subjects is quite limited.

Findings from this study highlight the need to inform parents about school health curricula and current classroom health education. Results also show that parents need to be solicited for their involvement in school health education activities. Parents lacked adequate health information to answer their children's questions, which leads to reduced self-efficacy about whether they could 'indeed answer these questions. Schools and teachers should therefore consider providing parents with the resources and opportunities to increase their own knowledge, in the hopes that this could possibly facilitate greater parent involvement. This could possibly be accomplished through parent news letters, or handouts and assignments that students take home and share with parents, corresponding to the class health lesson.

The issue of a total barrier score (the impact of multiple barriers) as it relates to parent involvement raises additional questions. The initial multiple regression analysis showed a significant negative association between the total number of barriers and parent involvement. This finding suggested that the compounding effect of multiple barriers decreased the likelihood of parent involvement. However, when the barrier scale was tested for reliability, the reliability score was very weak (alpha=0.5931), thus indicating that the barrier scale was not usable. Based upon these two potentially conflicting findings, additional research should further examine the compounded effect of multiple factors on parent involvement in health education.

IMPLICATIONS

Schools and teachers should consider developing more effective ways to actively involve parents as well as making more parents aware of the opportunities that do exist. Knowing why parents do not actively engage in their children's health education can shed light on the development of future methods to increase their involvement. Research with more diverse groups of parents is needed to further clarify these findings. Multiple barriers, especially certain combinations of barriers could have a particularly deleterious impact on parent involvement and future research should examine this issue in more detail.

Table 1. Top 10 Reported Barriers to Participating in Health Education

Rank                     Barrier                     Percent Response

1      Lack of Time                                        22.1
2      Unaware of opportunities to participate in          14.7
       health education
3      Few actual chances to volunteer in health           11.0
       education
4      School does not ask parents to participate          10.5
       in health education
5      Health curriculum does not encourage parent          7.9
       involvement
6      I seldom receive notices sent home from              7.7
       school
7      I do not know what my child learns about             5.3
       health in school (health curriculum)
8      I have insufficient health information to            4.9
       answer my child's questions
9      My child is embarrassed by my presence at            4.0
       school
10     Other (combination of the seven remaining           11.9
       barriers)
Table 2. Multiple Regression: Significant Associations between
Dependent and Independent Variables (p [less than or equal to] 0.05)

Variable               B        df      Standard Error

Q20 (1)             -1.127       1          0.4238
Q25 (2)             -0.982       1          0.4145
Barrier Scale (3)   -0.227       1          0.0936

Variable            p-value   R-value       95% CI

Q20 (1)             0.0078    -0.8164     0.14-0.74
Q25 (2)             0.0178    -0.1555     0.17-0.84
Barrier Scale (3)   0.0152    -0.1597     0.66-0.96

(1) Not knowing what children were learning in school about health
(health curriculum).

(2) Having insufficient knowledge to comfortably answer child's
health questions.

(3) An increasing number of barriers identified by parents.