Parental involvement in higher education has become increasingly visible, with parents playing an active role in students’ academic choices, career planning, and everyday decision-making through frequent communication and sustained emotional and financial investment (Lowe & Dotterer, 2018; Boneva & Rauh, 2018). College-related matters such as course registration, academic progress, health concerns, and interpersonal relationships are often negotiated within the family rather than solely by students themselves (Mulcahy, 2019).

However, research on parental involvement among international students in higher education remains relatively limited. Where such studies do exist, they have largely focused on school-level education or contexts in which parents and students are geographically proximate. For example, Yuen and Cheung (2014) examined Malaysian cross-border students in Singapore and found that parental involvement played an authoritative role in shaping students’ achievement orientations, echoing findings from broader studies on educational engagement (Hamilton et al., 2011). These studies, however, do not fully capture the experiences of international higher education students whose parents remain physically distant, nor do they account for how parental involvement is negotiated across national borders under conditions of heightened uncertainty.

Recent scholarship has begun to highlight the distinctive challenges faced by international families navigating higher education systems from a distance. Studies have shown how international parents engage with unfamiliar institutional, cultural, and linguistic contexts, often relying on digital communication to remain involved in their children’s lives abroad (Gil et al., 2023). At the same time, reviews of recent literature suggest that parental involvement continues to shape students’ engagement and motivation in diverse and transnational learning contexts (Yang, 2023), while emerging work points to the role of parental support in sustaining students’ academic motivation and emotional commitment in digitally mediated environments (Shebani et al., 2025). These insights underline the need to examine parental involvement as a relational and transnational process rather than a purely individual or culturally bounded practice.

Against this backdrop, this study focuses on Chinese international students in the UK during and following the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic intensified parental concerns around safety, mobility, and future prospects, while also amplifying reliance on digital communication and transnational family coordination. This study aims to explore how parental involvement influenced Chinese international students’ academic and everyday experiences during this period, and how such involvement was negotiated when parents remained in China while students pursued higher education in the UK. It is guided by the following research questions:

(1) How do Chinese international students in the UK experience and negotiate parental involvement during the COVID-19 pandemic?

(2) What social, cultural, and contextual factors shape parental involvement in the academic lives of Chinese international students?

The study adopts a poststructuralist framework that conceptualises identity as fluid, relational, and dynamically constructed through social interaction (Norton, 2013; Baxter, 2016). Within this framework, agency is understood as a socially and culturally mediated capacity to act (Ahearn, 2001), rather than an individual attribute exercised in isolation. As Pavlenko (2002) argues, agency is co-constructed and shaped by broader social constraints, making it particularly relevant for examining how international students respond to parental expectations within transnational contexts. Identity and agency are therefore examined together, acknowledging individuals’ capacity to make choices and pursue personal goals while remaining embedded in relational and structural conditions (Duff, 2012). Drawing on this perspective, the study explores how Chinese international students contest, accommodate, and negotiate parental involvement in their academic trajectories (Darvin & Norton, 2021), conceptualising identity as a “site of struggle” (Duff, 2012, p. 412) between familial influence, cultural values, and students’ own sense of agency.

This study was conducted over a six-month period with eleven participants from China who were studying at a UK university at the time of the research. Participants were recruited through a snowball sampling approach and represented a range of academic levels, from undergraduate to doctoral programmes, as well as diverse disciplinary backgrounds. A qualitative approach was adopted to enable nuanced insights into participants’ lived experiences and everyday negotiations of parental involvement. Traditional ethnography often requires extended periods of immersive fieldwork, which can be impractical within the time constraints of doctoral research (Storesund & McMurray, 2009). Instead, this study adopts a mini-ethnographic approach, which allows for in-depth cultural exploration within a shorter timeframe while still generating rich and contextualised data (Storesund & McMurray, 2009). Rather than aiming for statistical generalisation, this approach supports analytical insight into how parental involvement is experienced and negotiated in specific social and cultural contexts. Data collection consisted of semi-structured interviews, audio diaries, and informal conversations. These methods facilitated a processual understanding of participants’ experiences by capturing their evolving perspectives and practices over time (Fusch et al., 2017). At the initial stage, each participant took part in a one-to-one semi-structured interview, followed by ongoing informal conversations and audio diary reflections that documented experiences as they unfolded. At the ending stage, participants were invited to a follow-up semi-structured interview to reflect on changes in their experiences and perspectives. Due to the pandemic, data collection followed a hybrid online and offline model, ensuring flexibility while maintaining sustained engagement with participants. This approach enabled the study to capture participants’ ongoing negotiations of parental involvement in a transnational education context shaped by mobility restrictions and digital communication. Data analysis was conducted using thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006), combining both inductive and deductive approaches. NVivo was used to support data management and coding. All interactions were audio-recorded and transcribed using Microsoft Word’s transcription function, followed by manual checking. As the data were generated in Mandarin Chinese, translation into English followed a meaning-oriented approach that aimed to remain as close as possible to participants’ original expressions while avoiding misinterpretation (Abfalter et al., 2020; Abfalter et al., 2021). Ethical considerations were addressed through informed consent, anonymisation, and reflexive attention to the researcher’s positionality as a Chinese researcher working with participants from a shared cultural background.

The findings suggest that parental involvement plays a sustained and evolving role in Chinese international students’ educational experiences across stages—before departure, during overseas study, and as graduation approaches. This involvement is shaped not only by family dynamics and cultural values such as filial piety (Zhu & Chang, 2019), but also by broader conditions of global uncertainty, including the pandemic, media narratives, and shifting socio-economic contexts. Prior to departure, many parents expressed strong opposition to overseas study due to concerns about health risks, mobility restrictions, and pandemic-related uncertainty. These concerns often resulted in intensive negotiations, during which students exercised agency in different ways, including seeking financial independence through scholarships or relying on prolonged discussion and strategic compliance to gain parental approval. During their studies in the UK, parental involvement remained pervasive despite geographical distance. Influenced by media portrayals, pandemic-related policies, and anxieties around personal safety, parents continued to monitor students’ daily lives through frequent communication and even financial regulation. Students did not simply comply or resist; instead, they adopted subtle negotiation strategies to balance autonomy with familial expectations by selectively managing shared information and adjusting routines. As graduation approached, parental involvement increasingly extended into career decision-making. Concerns about economic uncertainty and post-pandemic labour markets led many parents to favour stable and locally anchored jobs, while students aspiring to alternative or transnational career trajectories often encountered resistance, resulting in further negotiation rather than open conflict. Overall, these findings highlight parental involvement as a dynamic and relational process reshaped by global crises and transnational conditions. Rather than positioning agency and parental influence as oppositional, the study underscores how Chinese international students negotiate autonomy within ongoing familial relationships and suggests that universities may better support international students by recognising the continued role of parents in shaping students’ academic experiences and future planning.

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