Family Fun Time Activities
Alex Thompson
Longwood University
SOCL 345: Social Research and Program Evaluation
Dr. JoEllen Pederson
November 28, 2022
Abstract
This research examines does family activities increase family involvement. This issue already has research behind it, however, more research to back up the data already found is needed. Real life issues that this study can help address includes not enough guardians/immediate family actively being involved in their children’s academic education. The purpose of this study is to examine through surveys that are sent out to young students who are enrolled in the STEP Head Start Program and young students enrolled in the Andy Taylor Program to evaluate if family activities increases family involvement in their children’s academic education. The data that has been collected and analyzed are questions regarding if the family completed the activity, was the child successful in completing the activity, how involved was the family throughout the activity, how much did your family enjoy this activity. This study was a mixed methods study, and my qualitative data were three open-ended questions at the biggening of the survey which are “what did your family enjoy most about these activities and why?” “What did your child learn from these activities?” “What recommendations would you suggest making these activities better?” My quantitative data are five closed-ended question based on the activity. Which are “did your family complete this activity?” “Did your child cut out the leaves for this activity?” “Was your child able to use the glue successfully to complete the activity?” “How involved was your family (scale 0-10)?” “How much did your family enjoy this activity (scale 0-10)?” The themes within this study are enjoyability, family bonding, and learning new skills. The practical implication of the study is sending the surveys home with the students and having them completed and turned back into their teacher on time while maintaining a high return rate.
Introduction
The research problem was parents are not involved in their children’s academic success as they should be. According to Berthelsen and Walker (2008) and Ansari and Gershoff (2016) parents are not as involved with their children due to reasons such as the parents work schedule and the child’s school schedule would create interference for potential opportunities for parents to be actively involved in their child’s academic success. Studies by Berthelsen and Walker (2008), Ansari and Gershoff (2016), and Manz (2012) talk about these issues. For example, Berthelsen and Walker (2008) found that for the families that had high family involvement in their child’s education led to those parents/guardians would finish school and go on to post-secondary schooling. The deficiency was that there were a lot of factors that play a role in parent involvement and these studies do not focus on them as a whole but rather one or two specific reasons and focuses on those into detail. The significance for this study is very important and targeted towards future researchers of family involvement in their child’s academic success. The purpose of this paper is to show and explain the different themes of parent involvement. It is also to show how Family Fun Time activities can help increase parent involvement. The overall purpose is having these activities serve as a bonding path to allow for more parent and child involvement to occur through these activities.
Literature Review
Previous research shows that parent involvement is a crucial role in child’s academic development according to (El Nokali, Bachman, & Votruba-Drzal, 2010). This explains that parent involvement continues to weld a significant role in children’s development as they proceed through their academic careers. At the same time, it is important for future research to go in depth on parent behavior that support children’s academic achievement. In addition, according to (Choi, Chang, Kim, & Reio, 2015), children’s academic success is heavily based on if that child’s had parental involvement or not when in school. These researchers also found that parental involvement and the students’ academic achievement rate are very closely related to preadolescent students along with student SES and parent aspirations. According to previous research from Berthelsen and Walker (2008), parental involvement in their children’s education were very high and this was apparent because of parents self-reporting along with teacher reporting as well. Berthelsen and Walker (2008) also found due to a global rating based on engagement found that two-thirds of parents/guardians were very involved with their child’s academic education. This then led to those two-thirds of parents/guardians expecting that their child would finish school and move on to post-secondary schooling that being either a university or vocational schooling. From the global rating of those two-thirds of involved parents they reported that schools did a good job at making the parents aware of multiple opportunities to be involved in their child’s academic school and success. Comparing (Choi, Chang, Kim, & Reio, 2015) to Berthelsen and Walker (2008), these two academic journals are very similar in their findings. (Choi, Chang, Kim, & Reio, 2015) discussed how parental involvement and their children’s academic success were closely related to preadolescent students which is very similar to what Berthelsen and Walker (2008) found. They found that parental involvement is known to decrease as their children enter post-secondary schooling due to the change in structure of post-secondary schooling along with parents believing that they are unable to assist with higher difficulty secondary school subjects.
Programs
According to the research from Ansari and Gershoff (2016), they found that two of the biggest reasons why parents were not involved in their child’s academic success was due to the parents work schedule and the school schedule which would interfere with potential opportunities for the parents to be actively involved in their child’s academic success through the Head Start program. However, they did also come across that teachers and staff training in parent involvement did indeed have a connection to a stronger parent involvement when those teachers/staff got an opportunity to communicate with the child’s parents. Now, Manz (2012) explains that home visiting from the Head Start program had no impact on the levels on parental involvement in school-based involvement, home based involvement, and home-school communication. However, Ansari and Gershoff (2016) is closely connected to Manz (2012) because they both compared the use of the Head Start program and found that due to conflicts in schedules interfered with parent involvement and that home visits did not change that outcome. However, sending home activities through the program for parents and their children to work on together when they have the time to is shown to increase parental involvement in their child’s literacy skills as well as academic success according to DeLoatche et al., (2015).
Socioeconomic status
According to Hilado et al., (2011), they found that in order to increase the parent involvement rate different types of strategies must be used. For example, considerations in cultural background play a factor along with family circumstances that they are in. They also found that early childhood programs that are higher in quality are able to support academic learning and on top of that support the child’s and the family of the child’s welfare which in return will boost parental involvement. On the same hand, Stevens and Patel (2015) found that following the social capital theory school that do not like the idea of incorporating parents into school activities are in return providing low level of social capital because the school and parents do not have a trusting relationship together on top of lack of communication.
Family involvement has many different factors that play into the quality of family involvement. According to the findings from the researchers above family involvement is a crucial role in a child’s academic success. However, according to past research it has been shown that parent involvement decreases as the progress to post-secondary schooling. This builds an argument for more research to be conducted to see why parent involvement decreases around this time.
Data and Methodology
Instrument
A survey questionnaire was created by the 50 members of the Social Research and Program Evaluation team at Longwood University. The survey asked both open and close-ended questions. Items on the survey were designed to evaluate SMART objectives of five activities that were completed the previous week by Head Start and Andy Taylor Center families. Items were included that also address demographic information, enjoyment of the activities, family involvement, and completion of the activities. Hard copies of the questionnaire were delivered to Head Start and the Andy Taylor Center.
Sample
The non-probability sample for this study was based on 100 children (ages three to five years old). Seventy-nine children attended Head Start in three counties. Head Start is a federally subsidized preschool for families with economic need. Twenty-one children attended the Andy Taylor Center which is located on a college campus, and families apply and pay for their children to attend. Attached to the questionnaire was a children’s book to incentivize families to return the survey. Guardians of the children were asked to complete the survey and return it to the preschool the next day. Teachers sent a reminder home with children to return outstanding questionnaires. This resulted in sixteen questionnaires being returned. Overall, there was a 16 % response rate.
Quantitative Analysis
Quantitative analysis of the returned surveys was based on the close-ended questions. For this study the dependent variable is family involvement. The item from the questionnaire that was used to operationalize this was how involved was your family throughout the activity? The answer choices for this item were scale zero to ten, and zero being not at all and ten being a great amount. For this study the independent variable is “does income affect parent involvement”. The item from the questionnaire that was used to operationalize this was “what is your household income”? The answer choices for this item were “Less than 10,000, 10,000 – 30,999, 31,000 – 50,999, 51,000 – 70,999, 71,000 – 90,999, 91,000 or more, prefer not to say”. Descriptive statistics were used to analyze these variables.
Qualitative Analysis
Qualitative analysis of the returned surveys was based on open-ended questions. The open-ended questions on the survey were “what did your family enjoy most about these activities, why? What did your child learn from these activities, and what recommendations would you suggest to make these activities better”. To answer the research question, “does income affect parent involvement”, inductive open coding was used to determine reoccurring themes in the respondents’ responses.
My dependent variable is “How involved was your family throughout the activity”? (Scale 0-10; 0 = not at all, 10 = a great amount). The mean of this data is 8.5, the standard deviation of this data is 2.14. My independent variable “What is your annual household income”? (Less than $10,000, $10,000 – $30,999, $31,000 – $50,999, $51,000 – $70,999, $71,000 – $90,999, $91,000 – or more, prefer not to answer). According to the graph four households chose less than $10,000 annually, two households chose $10,000 – $30,999 annually, two households chose $31,000 – $50,999 annually, one household chose $71,000 – $90,999 annually, and three households chose to prefer not to answer.
After analyzing the connection of family involvement to household income the four households that chose less than $10,000 annually had a mean of 8.67. The two households that chose $10,000 – $30,999 annually had a mean of 10. The two households that chose $31,000 – $50,999 annually had a mean of 10. The single household that chose $71,000 – $90,999 annually had a mean of 10. The single household that chose $91,000 – or more annually had a mean of 7. The three households that chose prefer not to answer had a mean of 5.67. The categories that only had one respondent does not tell us much about the true mean of those categories. This is because only one family responded we know their exact answer and because there were one respondent for those two categories the data is not exact and may be skewed.
Qualitative Findings
The Family Fun Time Activities contain three main themes enjoyability, family bonding, and learning new skills. In relation to enjoyability I found 10 out of 16 surveys contained this common theme. Second respondent stated, “I enjoy watching [child’s name] complete these activities while I assist her”. The third respondent stated, “Our family really enjoyed how simple the activities were and how much our child enjoyed them”. The fifth respondent stated, “It’s fun when you want to do something fun and enjoyable for kids and family”. Lastly the seventh respondent stated, “We enjoyed putting all different shapes together on the pizza survey”. This relates to the enjoyability of the Family Fun Time Activities because this relates back to family involvement because I want families to be more involved together and enjoying their activities can assist in more overall involvement with one another.
The second theme out of the three main themes is family bonding. In relation to family bonding, we found 8 out of 16 surveys contained this common theme. The first respondent stated, “A free convenient activity to do as a family”. The fourth respondent stated, “Time spent together and the talks”. The fifth respondent stated, “It’s fun when you want to do something fun and enjoyable for kids and family”. Lastly, the tenth respondent stated, “Doing them together. [child’s name] says she loves doing things with mom and dad”. This relates to the family bonding of the Family Fun Time Activities because this relates back to family involvement because if families are bonding together that has a direct impact to family involvement due to the family bonding and spending time together.
The third theme out of the three themes is learning new skills. In relation to learning new skills 10 out of 16 surveys also contained this common theme. The eighth respondent stated, “Knowing more items”. The ninth respondent stated, “learned letters, numbers, how to take turns”. The eleventh respondent stated, “He learned shapes, colors, and his emotions”. Lastly, the fourteenth respondent stated, “The emotion flipbook it helps the child understand emotions without sound and it helps them know the meaning of emotions”. This relates to learning new skills of the Family Fun Time Activities because if they are taking the time to learn new skills it means they are spending time together which is the same as family involvement. These three main themes directly relate back to parent involvement. If these three main themes are present within the surveys them family involvement is also present as well.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the main points of this paper are that parent involvement is crucial in a child’s academic success. Overall, the three themes that were moat common within this paper and the surveys that were sent home to the children through the HEAD Start Program and the Andy Taylor Program are enjoyability, family bonding, and learning new skills. What I found was that with the families that completed the activity and returned the surveys to their teachers they seemed to enjoy doing the Cupcake Flower Activity as a family and watching their child learn new skills. I also found that the families that completed the activities seemed to have a higher rate in family involvement and would like to do more activities as a whole. This ties into a much bigger picture however, this shows that family activities do in fact help families spend more time together with their child while they are learning new skills and understanding the activity. The whole reason for the research and analyzing the finding was to test to see if Family Fun Time Activities would increase family involvement and from the responses that we received back it does in fact to appear that way. However, there is always room and a need for more research to get a more accurate and up to date data.
References
Ansari, A., & Gershoff, E. (2016). Parent involvement in head start and children’s development: indirect effects through parenting. Journal of Marriage and Family, 78(2), 562–579. https://doi.org/10.1111/jomf.12266
Berthelsen, D., & Walker, S. (2008). Parents’ involvement in their children’s education. Family Matters, 79(79), 34–41.
Choi, N., Chang, M., Kim, S., & Reio, T. G. J. (2015). A structural model of parent involvement with demographic and academic variables. Psychology in the Schools, 52(2), 154–167.
DeLoatche, K. J., Bradley-Klug, K. L., Ogg, J., Kromrey, J. D., & Sundman-Wheat, A. N. (2015). Increasing parent involvement among head start families: a randomized control group study. Early Childhood Education Journal, 43(4), 271–279. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10643-014-0660-7
El Nokali, N. E., Bachman, H. J., & Votruba-Drzal, E. (2010). Parent involvement and children’s academic and social development in elementary school. Child Development, 81(3), 988–1005.
Hilado, A., Kallemeyn, L., Leow, C., Lundy, M., & Israel, M. (2011). Supporting child welfare and parent involvement in preschool programs. Early Childhood Education Journal, 39(5), 343–353.
Manz, P. (2012). Home-based head start and family involvement: an exploratory study of the associations among home visiting frequency and family involvement dimensions. Early Childhood Education Journal, 40(4), 231–238. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10643-012-0512-2
Stevens, S., & Patel, N. (2015). Viewing generativity and social capital as underlying factors of parent involvement. School Community Journal, 25(1), 157–174.