Parent’s socioeconomic background, family resources and parental involvement influencing on student’s post-secondary education expectation

Parents as the primacy agent of socialization are important to influence students’ educational pathways they are undertaken after compulsory education. Past studies have found that parents’ social status and family resources have intertwined effect on the differential patterns of educational expectation between students from different socio-cultural milieu. Those studies indicated that students from high socioeconomic background with more family resources are more likely expecting to pursue university degree than those of low socioeconomic groups. Parental involvement, as one of family cultural socialization exists in different forms, is conducive to support their children in their process of navigation to post-secondary education.

The present paper attempts to link these three dimensions of family factors – family socioeconomic status, family resources and parental involvement, and to study their relationships with adolescents’ expectations to reach post-secondary education. The data were drawn from a recent longitudinal study which was an extension of PISA 2021. A total of 3,000 students aged 15 years in Hong Kong have participated in the subsequent survey. The logistic regression model was deployed to address the research question: to what extent family socioeconomic background, family resources and parental involvement predict students’ expectation of pursuing university degree. In particular, the relative contributions of different forms of parental involvement were clarified while student academic background was also controlled.

The results affirm the persistence of inequalities on structural regularities that are linked to parents’ occupation and cultural possession. Nevertheless, the role of parent involvement in social communication with their children has significant relationship with students’ expectation on going to university, regardless of parent’s social status, family resource and student’s academic background. The findings may pose the need to strengthen parental involvement, in particular the reciprocal interactions between parents and students, through communications on various topics including but not limiting to academic issues. Copyright © 2015 ERNAPE-ARCTIC.