‘All we need is love (and money)’! What do higher education students want from their families?

Abstract

Research has shown that consistent family support improves higher education (HE) students’ chances for adjustment and graduation but family over-involvement negatively affects students’ well-being. We theoretically bridge three largely disjointed bodies of literature (namely, family ‘support’, ‘involvement’ and ‘over-involvement’) and show that families of undergraduate students very often engage in roles traditionally reserved for lower levels of education. Through a large-scale, quantitative university student survey in two universities in Cyprus, we empirically show that the three bodies of literature should be unified, because family involvement in HE is better conceptualised and operationalised as a continuum. We further suggest that family involvement in HE can be split into two qualitatively different and empirically not significantly related constructs: rearguard and front line family involvement. In addition, the students seem not only to approve, but also encourage more family involvement (even ‘over-involvement’), and state that they would like their families to provide them not just with more financial help, but with more emotional support as well. The discussion extends to include an analysis of students’ perceptions of university actors’ attitudes towards family involvement.

Keywords:

• Parental involvement
• family involvement
• higher education
• university education
• Cyprus

Notes

1. Henceforth, we will be using the term ‘involvement’ as a general term covering all types of active relationships between the family and the student.

2. Similar studies usually have a sample between 300 and 600 participants. For example, N = 268 for Odenweller et al. (2014); N = 317 for LeMoyne and Buchanan 2011; N = 297 for Schiffrin et al. (2014), N = 272 for Miller-Ott (2016), N = 538 for Segrin et al. (2012), N = 511 for Bradley-Geist and Olson-Buchanan (2014) and N = 653 for Segrin et al. (2013).

3. One of the questions, however, ‘My family helps me choose courses’ loads almost similarly on both factors, probably because – in the two universities participating in the study-course selection and registration sometimes happens on the premises of the university (e.g. it is sometimes a Front line activity); thus, this question may be inappropriate or misleading and was removed from further analysis.

4. 4. DWLS χ2(124)=238.636, p < 0.01; Robust χ2(124)=258.784, p < 0.01; CFI = 0.981; TLI = 0.976; RMSEA = 0.035 with 95% CI (0.029, 0.041).

5. A Velicer MAP criterion (Polychoric correlations) suggested to retain two factors, however, a parallel analysis and a Very Simple Structure (VSS) complexity analyses suggested that three factors should be extracted from the data.