Sociology: Methods in Context - Researching Parents

-By how they bring up their children.

-By their involvement in school through parent-teacher contacts, parent governors, attendance at parents' evenings and so on.

-Marketisation policies encourage parents to see themselves as consumers, for example in choice of school.

Parents aren't necessarily an easy group to study. They are not a single homogeneous group, their class, gender and ethnicity may all affect how willing or able they are to participate in research. For example, pro-school middle-class parents may be more likely than working-class parents to return questionnaires about their children's education and this will make the research findings unrepresentative.

Parental permission is required for many forms of research with pupils. How likely parents are to give their permission may depend on the sensitivity of the research issue and on whether they can see their children benefitting from being involved. In general, the more sensitive an issue appears to be for parents, the less likely they are to consent to their children participating in research.

Parents may engage in impression management, presenting themselves to researchers in a positive light by exaggerating their involvement in their children's education. For example, they may lie about whether they attend parents' evenings or how often they read to their children. If so, this will result in invalid data being gathered.

Unlike most other important groups within education, parents are unusual in that they are for the most part physically located outside the school. This may make them more difficult to contact and research.

Although lists of parents' names and addresses exist in school records, a school would not normally release such information to researchers. However, the school might well be happy to help a researcher contact parents by using the usual method of sending letters or questionnaires home with pupils. However, this would not necessarily guarantee the parents received them or that pupils always returned the questionnaires that their parents had completed.