Barriers and solutions to participation in family-based education interventions

ABSTRACT

The fact that many sub-populations do not take part in research, especially participants from lower socioeconomic (SES) backgrounds, is a serious problem in education research. To increase the participation of such groups we must discover what social, economic and practical factors prevent participation, and how to overcome these barriers. In the current paper, we review the literature on this topic, before describing a case study that demonstrates four potential solutions to four barriers to participation in a shared reading intervention for families from lower SES backgrounds. We discuss the implications of our findings for family-based interventions more generally, and the difficulty of balancing strategies to encourage participation with adhering to the methodological integrity of a research study.

KEYWORDS:

• Shared reading
• interventions
• socioeconomic status (SE)
• barriers
• families

Acknowledgments

This research was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council [ES/L008955/1; ES/M003752/1]. The analysis of this data, and initial drafts of the paper were carried out when Jamie Lingwood was at the University of Liverpool, Rachael Levy was at the University of Sheffield, and while Caroline Rowland was funded at the ESRC LuCiD Centre by the Economic and Social Research Council at the University of Liverpool ([ES/L008955/1]).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary material

Supplementary data for this article can be accessed here

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council [ES/L008955/1; ES/M003752/1].

Notes on contributors

Jamie Lingwood

Dr. Jamie Lingwood is a Research Fellow in the Department of Linguistics & Phonetics at the University of Leeds, UK.

Rachael Levy

Dr. Rachael Levy is an Associate Professor in the Department of Learning and Leadership at the Institute of Education, University College London, UK.

Josie Billington

Dr. Josie Billington is a Reader in the Department of English and Deputy Director for the Centre for Research into Reading, Literature and Society at the University of Liverpool, UK.

Caroline Rowland

Prof. Caroline Rowland is the Director of the Language Development Department at the Max Plank Institute for Psycholinguistics, Professor at the Donders Institute at Radboud University, Netherlands, and, Professor at the ESRC International Centre for Language and Communicative Development (LuCiD Centre) at the University of Liverpool, UK.