A Typology of Parental Involvement in Student Experience: A Latent Class Analysis

We examine the extent to which there are significantly different types of Parental Involvement in student’s high school experience, and what the relationship of these different types may be to long-term student outcomes, such as high school graduation, college going, and specifically for this study, STEM career outcomes. With the dataset the Education Longitudinal Study of 2002 (ELS:2002) which includes 11,727 parents of high school students in the United States, we examine how parents interact with students and schools using Latent Class Analysis (LCA). We identify three significantly different subgroups of parent involvement: Guiding (44.2%), Lenient (22.3%), and Advocate (33.5%). Parental context and demographic factors, such as gender and ethnicity, and school variables, such as private status and school size, are significantly associated with membership across subgroups, which in turn are related to students’ education outcomes, such as college enrollment and selection of a STEM career versus other career outcomes.