Parental Involvement as a Holistic Concept Using Rasch/Guttman Scenario Scales

Abstract

Parental involvement (PI) in the education of their children is an important factor which should be taken into account when assessing and predicting children’s school outcomes. However, PI encompasses numerous operationalizations from checking homework, to communication with school, to organizing cultural outings. This study describes a Rasch/Guttman scenario-based scale designed to provide a holistic approach to measuring the PI construct. The Parental Involvement SCenarios scale (PISC-9) was administered to 1,930 parents of primary school children from a sample representative of a Russian region. The scale has very good technical and construct validity characteristics. More specifically, raw scores on the PISC-9 may be represented as locations along a hierarchical continuum from relatively less to increasingly more time consuming and demanding parental behaviors.