PARENTS’ ATTITUDE TOWARDS SCHOOLING AND EDUCATION OF CHILDREN Project rePort Submitted to Department of Humanities and Social Sciences

The present study was aimed at assessing attitude of parents towards the education and schooling of their children. The study analyzed the data from 145 parents, who had one or more than one school going children. Out of these, 116 parents belonged to tribal families and 29 families belonged to non-tribal families.The age range of the sample was 25-35 years, and they all belonged to Santoshpur village of Sundargarh district consisting largely of tribal population. A 23-item questionnaire was used for collecting data along with personal interview. The respondents were required to indicate their agreement or disagreement with each of the statements about children’s education in a four-point Likert type scale, where 1 denotes strong disagreement and 4 denotes strong agreement. Mean scores were calculated separately for tribal and non-tribal samples, and for male and female respondents. The‘t’ test was used to examine the significance of difference between tribal and non-tribal communities as well as across gender with regard to their attitude towards children’s schooling and education. The findings showed that the overall attitude of the respondents was moderately favorable and positive towards schooling and education of their children. The results also indicated that there was no significant difference in the attitude of tribal and nontribal parents. Gender difference was also found to be non-significant. The difference between tribal and non-tribal respondents was evident in their future plans to provide facilities for higher studies for their children. The study suggested that, although government endeavors at universalizing education has resulted in creating mass awareness and positive response towards schooling and education, there is a lot of scope for improvement in this regard. Future implications of the present study for policy formulation as well as for further research were pointed out.