Browsing by Author "Koski, Iikka"

The goal of this study was to investigate the connections between parental involvement and children’s school well-being. Previous studies in the field have considered cooperation between the home and the school system mainly through its’ affects on school performance. Correspondingly, parental involvement has had a respectively small role in the study of school well-being. Previous studies have proved that parents have an undeniable effect on their children’s overall well-being, and their support positively affects school performance. I’ve set a goal to research the connections between parental support and school well-being, because that has not been thoroughly investigated in past research. Well-being research is often goal oriented and serves a purpose in improving well-being, and parental involvement seems like an unused resource. In this study I will investigate the connections between parental involvement and school well-being, both as a whole and on different dimensions of well-being. I used a dataset of around 10 000 answers that surveyed well-being in Finnish schools. The data was accessed through the Finnish Social Science Data Archive. The data is collected from 7–9 grade students during 2017–2018, and it collected with the Koulun hyvinvointiprofiili survey in Finnish secondary schools. Koulun hyvinvointiprofiili is designed as a self-evaluation tool for schools, and it is based on Anne Konu’s Koulun hyvinvointimalli -conceptual model that was introduced in her dissertation and published in 2002. The data contains a division of well-being into four dimensions: the answerers experience of the school conditions, social relationships, means for self-fulfillment and health status. In addition, the survey measures parental involvement, which it includes in the social relationships dimension. I will analyze the connections between parental involvement and school well-being using correlation (r), coefficient of determination (r²), and regression analysis. My analysis indicated that parental involvement and support in their child’s schooling is in clear connection with children’s school well-being. Parental involvement has the strongest connection to means of self-fulfillment and social relationships. With other dimensions of well-being there was a positive correlation, but not as strong. It is also important to note, that the dimensions of well-being strongly correlate between themselves. As a result, the possible benefits gained from parental involvement in one dimension of well-being will support the whole of the child’s school well-being. The Finnish school system must be able to cooperate and communicate with a diversity of families, and thus take into account the potential of home as a resource in children’s well-being.