A reformulated model of barriers to parental involvement in education: comment on Hornby and Lafaele (2011)

Abstract

In a 2011 article in this journal, Hornby and Lafaele provided a comprehensive model to understand barriers that may adversely impact effectiveness of parental involvement (PI) in education. The proposed explanatory model provides researchers with a new comprehensive and systematic perspective of the phenomenon in question with references from an extensive trove of literature. However, the proposed model fails to reflect the interactions among the different factors and how the broader context of society influences the relationships. Thus, the objective of the current article seeks to provide a few adaptations to reformulate the explanatory model proposed by Hornby and Lafaele to better explain how the different barriers can have interactive and confounding effects on effective PI in education. It is our hope that this reformulated model will demonstrate greater potential to the understanding of the barriers to PI in education when the interaction and confounding effects of different factors on PI are taken into consideration within the boarder context of society.

Keywords:

• Parental involvement
• parent–school relationship
• parent–child relationship
• parent influence
• parent participation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.