Introduction
The research question being addressed is can activities encourage parental or family involvement. If families participate in all activities sent home then they are more likely to be encouraged and be involved with their children. This is what the expected outcome was hoped to be. One thing that can make or break family involvement is how often parents have to work. Some may feel that they do not have enough time to help and be involved with their children after work as they have regular at home responsibilities as well. The purpose of this research is to show how involved some parents or families are by sending home Family Fun Time activities. The activities sent home were sent to Head Start families and surveys were sent afterwards to try and gauge the level of involvement the parents or families had. Not every family was going to be fully involved, but the hope was to have all the families do at least one or two of the activities with their children. Not every family did, but that is to be expected.
Quantitative Findings
For the quantitative findings themes section the following variables were analyzed using descriptive statistics: Parental work responsibility and parent involvement with their child. For parental work responsibility, one respondent reported having to work zero to ten hours. One respondent reported having to work twenty-one to thirty hours. Seven respondents reported having to work thirty-one to forty hours. Two respondents reported having to work forty-one to fifty hours. These findings can be seen in figure 1.
Figure 1.
Parental Work Responsibility
The dependent variable is Parent Involvement measured on a scale from 0 to 10. The mean parent involvement score was 8.3. The median score was 8. The mode score was 10. The standard deviation is 1.7. This can be seen in table 1.
Table 1.
Parent involvement
| Mean | Median | Mode | S.D | |
| Level of Involvement | 8.3 | 8 | 10 | 1.7 |
A bivariate analysis was run. The bivariate analysis is the mean of the factors. The mean for zero to then hours was 10. The mean for twenty-one to thirty hours was 10. The mean for thirty-one to forty hours was 7.5. The mean for forty-one to fifty hours was 10. This can be seen in Table 2. This relates back to the literature review because it shows that parents that work less are more likely to be more involved because they have more time to do things with their children (Malone, 2017 ; Ntekane, 2018).
Table 2.
Mean Parent Involvement by Parent’s Work Responsibility
| Work Responsibility | Mean |
| 0-10 Hours | 10 |
| 21-30 Hours | 10 |
| 31-40 Hours | 7.5 |
| 41-50 Hours | 10 |
Independent Sample T-Test
An independent sample T-Test was run to compare level of involvement compared to how often families worked. The independent variable of this T-Test is how many hours on average did families work. This was recoded into two categories which are less hours worked and more hours worked. Less hours worked goes from 0 to 30 hours and more hours worked goes from 31 to 50 or more hours worked. The dependent variable for this T-Test is how much the parents were involved in the activity done and this was measured on a scale of one to ten.
Table 3.
Independent Sample T-Test of involvement by hours families worked.
| Hours worked | Mean | T-Statistic |
| Less Hours Worked | 10 | 0.00*** |
| More Hours Worked | 7.86 |
Note: p<.05*, p<.01**, p<.001***
The mean for less amount of time worked reported by families is 10. The mean for more amount of time worked reported by families is 7.86. The T-Statistic for this t-test is 0.00*** which shows that there is a statistical significance between the means. These results can be seen in Table 3.
ANOVA
An ANOVA test was run to compare the means of the three categories. The dependent variable of this ANOVA was how much the parents were involved in the activity done. This was asked on a scale of 0-10. The independent variable for this ANOVA was how often do the parents work. This was recorded into three categories which were less hours, moderate hours, and more hours worked. Less hours were grouped with hours ranging from 0 to 20. Moderate hours were grouped with 21 to 40 hours worked. More hours worked were grouped with hours ranging from 41 to 50 or more. The results of this can been seen in Table 4.
Table 4.
Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) of parental involvement by hours families worked.
| Hours worked | Mean | F-Value |
| Less Hours | 10 | 0.00*** |
| Moderate Hours | 10 | |
| More Hours | 7.86 |
Note: p<.05*, p<.01**, p<.001***
The mean involvement for less and moderate hours worked was 10 and the mean involvement for more hours worked was 7.86. The F-value for this ANOVA was 0.00***, which means there is a statistical difference between the means. Therefore, attendance to head start programs does influence parental involvement.
Pearson’s Correlation
A correlation was run to compare involvement and willingness to do the activity again to encourage more involvement. The dependent variable for this correlation was “How much were you involved in this activity?” which was asked on a 0-10 scale. The independent variable for this correlation was “Would you be willing to do this activity again with your child?” which was also asked on a 0-10 scale. The correlation coefficient for this test was 0.32. This is a moderate positive correlation between the variables. This shows that families are more willing to do activities again and they are more involved with their children.
Conclusion
The findings from this research show that parents are being involved with their child at a younger age. From the Independent sample T-Test and the ANOVA ran showed that the less time parents worked the more they were involved with the activities. For the involvement category, it was scaled on a scale from 0-10. 0 being no involvement and 10 being the most involved. The means for less hours worked for both tests and moderate hours for the ANOVA was 10 which was the highest on the scale. The results from the correlation showed a moderate positive correlation between involvement and willingness to do the activity again. This shows that families are more likely to be involved and even want to do the activities again or more things like them. Most of the families had different activities that they do at home to stay involved with their children, like reading or playing outside. Some families are more involved than others, but there are factors that cause this. The research done was to help researchers see how involved families in the area are and to try and determine better ways to get families involved and keep them involved. The question of if the activities given would encourage family involvement was answered with a yes, but with families working less averaging more than families who worked more and families are willing to do the activities again which fosters more involvement.