Measuring parental involvement in couple families in Australia: What is parental involvement and how should we measure it?

This paper reviews recent investigations into parental involvement. It explores factors that should be considered for measurement, including the measurement of father involvement. It is found that current directions of research on parenting focus on parental identity, division of labour and parenting styles. These directions in research are reviewed. Introduction Parental involvement is important for children, parents and society. Ongoing psychological and sociological research on parental involvement examines the impact of a particular measure or measures of involvement on a vast range of child progress indicators. These indicators are usually within the broad topics of child wellbeing, health, education and behaviour. A closer examination of this research shows that the concept of parental involvement has been used to investigate a seemingly endless stream of child outcomes. These topics encompass a diverse range, spanning sexual behaviour (Taris and Semin, 1988), sun-screen use (Donavan and Singh, 1999), behaviour problems (Gardner et al., 1999), educational attainment and achievement (McNeal, 1999; Steinberg et al., 1992), and alcohol and other drug use (Swadi, 1999) to present but a small sample. As well as sociological investigations of parental involvement, there are attempts from researchers in the demographic field to quantify the extent of parenting. This research is typically based on population-level data, and is presented using many different indicators. The types of investigation range from examinations of the level of fertility to the proportion of households with children present, or to the proportion of people who never have children. More innovative research may examine the number of years people spend with a child in their household, or the time spent by children in households with two parents or a single parent. Due to the many different family types and theoretical perspectives, a range of methods is needed to provide a comprehensive picture of parenting in Australia today. These different disciplinary interests provide the foundation for exploring parental involvement. But the question is, given these many disciplinary measures, how should parental involvement be quantified? The aim of this discussion paper is to overview the