A Meta-Ethnography of Parent Involvement in Special Education
Author(s):
Pi-Ju Wu (presenting / submitting)
Conference:
ECER 2015
Network:
14. Communities, Families and Schooling in Educational Research
Format:
Paper

Session Information

14 SES 13 B, Family Education, Parenting and School-Family-Community Links IV

Paper Session

Time:
2015-09-11
11:00-12:30
Room:
109.Oktatóterem [C]
Chair:
Aitor Gomez

Contribution

Parent involvement refers to the dedication of resources by a parent to his or her child within a given domain (Grolnick & Slowiaczek, 1994). It has become a widespread movement across many countries around the world (Centre for Educational Research and Innovation [CERI], 1997). The positive outcomes of parent involvement have been found not only for children in regular education (Jeynes, 2011), but also those with special needs (Kaiser & Stainbrook, 2010; Turnball, Turnbull, Erwin, Soodak, Shogren, 2010). Most countries acknowledge the importance of parents in matters relating to special educational provision and require various degrees of parental involvement in the assessment and design-making procedures through legislation (Hegarty, 1995; Lai & Vadeboncoeur, 2013). A report appointed by the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Employment, Social Affairs and Inclusion, Support for Children with Speical Educational Needs (SEN), also pointed out that involvement of parents of children with SEN is a vital factor in promoting inclusive schooling, but there is variation between Member States with regards to parents being able to choose their children’s school and their legal right to challenge decisions concerning placement and resource allocation (Drabble, 2013).

In Taiwan, parent involvement has been one of the important issues both in regular education and in special education. According to the Special Education Act amended in 2014, parent representatives with SEN children were invited to participate in the Special Education Consultation Committee and the Special Education Students Diagnosis and Placement Counseling Committee at the local authority level. At the school level, parent representatives with SEN children participate in the Special Education Implementation Committee and at least one parent with a SEN child should be a member or standing member of the School Parental Committee. Moreover, parents with SEN children are able to file complaints to authorities for controversies over diagnosis, placement and counseling services, and to schools for infringements of student’s rights in learning, counseling, support services and other learning activities. Besides, schools should develop the Individualized Education Plan for each student with SEN based on a multidisciplinary team and invite his/her parents for participation. Schools should offer consultation, counseling, parenting education, and transfer services to families with SEN children. In sum, parent involvement in special education in Taiwan emphasizes the parents’ collaboration and information sharing with professionals and their participation in the planning, assessment, and placement process.

Parent involvement in special education has also become one of the important issues in educational research. The rise in the number of research studies on parent involvement in special education results in the need of knowledge aggregation. A research synthesis aims to describe, analyze and draw conclusions on the research evidence, and helps inform professional practice (Ring, Ritchie, Mandava, & Jepson, 2011). Synthesis of quantitative evidence usually uses the procedure of meta-analysis to statistically analyze a large collection of analysis results from individual studies (Glass, McGaw, & Smith, 1981). Synthesis of qualitative evidence seeks to synthesize or amalgamate individual qualitative reports that relate to a specific topic or focus in order to arrive at the new or enhanced understanding about the phenomenon under study (Paterson, 2012). Meta-analysis has been used to analyze the effects of parent involvement in special education (Deng, 2013) and the treatment of SEN children (Corcoran & Dattalo, 2006). However, what information or knowledge derives from qualitative studies of parent involvement in special education remains unanswered or receives little attention. The present study aims to synthesize the findings of individual qualitative studies of parent involvement in special education in Taiwan.

Method

Methods for synthesizing qualitative studies may incline toward interpretive or aggregative. Mainly aggregative synthesis methods involve combining the findings of each primary study into a general description of a topic, while mainly interpretive synthesis methods construct new interpretations and generate new theories about a topic (Saini & Shlonsky, 2012). The method used in the study is Noblit and Hare’s (1988) meta-ethnography which is a comparative and interpretive approach to translating the findings of qualitative studies into one another. It is the most widely used method of qualitative synthesis (France et al., 2014; Toye et al., 2014). After formulating the research questions which focus on what, why and how parents involve in special education in Taiwan, searching for and retrieving qualitative studies which focused on topics related to parent involvement, invited parents with SEN children in Taiwan as the primary participants, utilized at least one of qualitative research approaches, contained data in the form of thick descriptions, and published by the end of 2013 in English or Chinese was conducted. Seven studies met the inclusion and exclusion criteria. An appraisal of study quality was used to know how it affected research findings and did not affect inclusion or exclusion decisions. Among the seven studies, five (71.4%) were unpublished master theses and two were published in academic journals; a large portion of the studies did not state their theoretical framework (71.4%) and the other two were based on the ecological systems theory; five of them did not specify the qualitative research approaches they used and the other two used the case study method; and the number of research participants included in the studies ranged from 1 to 26. After repeatedly reading each study, the key metaphors, concepts, or themes used in each study were noted. Then the metaphors, concepts, or themes collected from each study were organized into a list and were juxtaposed. Based on the information obtained from the juxtaposition, two forms of synthesis, reciprocal translation and lines-of-argument synthesis, were used to relate the studies into one another. A reciprocal translation involved an iterative process whereby the metaphors, concepts, or themes from one study could be directly translated into the terms of another study. Then the translations were taken further to develop a lines-of-argument synthesis which discovered the similarities and differences among the metaphors, concepts, or themes proposed in the studies and moved towards an advanced interpretation.

Expected Outcomes

The results of this study revealed that Brofenbrenner’s (1979) ecological systems theory could be used as the conceptual framework to translate the metaphors, concepts, or themes used in each study into one another. Family is one of the microsystems connecting directly with the child. Parents with SEN children often need to interact with other microsysemes such as school, hospital, and intervention programs, and with exsosystems like organizations for parents with SEN children. Therefore, parent involvement in special education consists of interactions among various levels of ecological systems. For example, “the role of instructor,” “Premack principle,” and “Q & A method” were components of the microsystem; “the role of volunteer,” “the role of communicator," and ”avoidance of conflicts” belong to the mesosystem; and “the role of advocater” relates to the exosystem and macrosystem. Parent involvement in special education could be characterized as dynamic and complicated, so it is affected by factors coming from the microsystem, mesosystem, exosystem, macrosystem, and chronosystem. Those factors may produce positive and negative effects. One of the key factors in affecting how parents involve in their SEN children’s education and what effects their involvement produce is parental autonomy in educational involvement. When parents actively and voluntarily involve in their SEN children’ education, often accompanied by intrinsic motivation for involvement, the results of their involvement are often positive. By contrast, when parental involvement is required by the Special Education Act, the extrinsic motivation for involvement sometimes results in negative effects. Besides, the positive effects resulting from parent involvement often overlap with the parents’ motivation for involvement. It reveals the cyclical nature of parent involvement in special education. The findings of this research link metaphors, concepts, or themes across individual qualitative studies and provide information about parent involvement in special education for professionals and education policy makers.

References

Bronfenbrenner, U. (1979). The ecology of human development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Centre for Educational Research and Innovation. (1997). Parents as partners in schooling. Paris, France: OECD. Corcoran, J., & Dattalo, P. (2006). Parent involvement in treatment for ADHA: A meta-analysis of the published studies. Research on Social Work Practice, 16, 561-70. doi:10.1177/1049731506289127 Deng, R. (2013). The factors influencing parental involvement in education for children with special needs: A meta-analysis (Unpublished master thesis). National Taipei University of Education, Taipei, Taiwan. Drabble, S. (2013). Support for children with special educational needs (SEN). Brussels, Belgium: European Commission. France, E., Ring, N., Thomas, R., Noyes, J., Maxwell, M., & Jepson, R. (2014). A methodological systematic review of what’s wrong with meta-ethnography. BMC Medical Research Methodology, 14(119). doi:10.1186/1471-2288-14-119 Glass, G. V., McGaw, B., & Smith, M. L. (1981). Meta-analysis in social research. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Grolnick, . S., & Slowiaczek, M. L. (1994). Parents’ involvement in children’s schooling: A multidimensional conceptualization and motivational model. Child Development, 65, 237‒252. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/1131378 Hegarty, S. (1995). Review of the present situation in special needs education. Paris, France: UNESCO. Jeynes, W. H. (2011). Parent involvement and academic success. New York, NY: Routledge. Kaiser, A. P., & Stainbrook, A. T. (2011). Family-school partnerships and communication interventions for young children with disabilities. In S. L. Christenson & A. L. Reschly, (Eds.), Handbook of school-family partnerships (pp. 287‒311). New York, NY: Routledge. Lai, Y., & Vadeboncoeur, A. (2013). The discourse of parent involvement in special education: A critical analysis linking policy documents to the experiences of mothers. Education Policy, 27, 867-897. doi:10.1177/0895904812440501 Noblit, G. W., & Hare, R. D. (1988). Meta-ethnography: Synthesizing qualitative studies. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Paterson, B. L. (2012). “It looks great but how do I know if it fits?”: An introduction to meta-synthesis research. In K. Hannes & C. Lockwood (Eds.), Synthesizing qualitative research: Choosing the right approach (pp. 1‒20). West Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell. Ring, N., Ritchie, K, Mandava, L, & Jepson, R. (2011). A guide to synthesizing qualitative research for researchers undertaking health technology assessment and systematic reviews. Retrieved from https://dspace.stir.ac.uk/bitstream/1893/ 3205/1/HTA_MethodsofSynthesisingQualitativeLiterature_DEC10%5B1%5D.pdf Saini, M., & Shlonsky, A. (2012). Systematic synthesis of qualitative research. New York, NY: Oxfore University Press. Toye, F., Seers, K., Allcock, N., Briggs, M., Carr, ., & Barker, K. (2014). Meta-ethnography 25years on: Challenges and insights for synthesizing a large number of qualitative studies. BMC Medical Research Methodology, 14(80). doi:10.1186/1471-2288-14-80 Turnball, A., Turnbull, R., Erwin, E., Soodak, L., & Shogren, K. (2010). Families, professionals, and exceptionality. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson.

Author Information

Pi-Ju Wu (presenting / submitting)
National Changhua University of Education
Graduate Institute of Education
Changhua

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