Editorial: Breaking the mold: groundbreaking methodologies and theories for parental involvement in education

Editorial on the Research Topic
Breaking the mold: groundbreaking methodologies and theories for parental involvement in education

Methodological innovations

The methodological innovations presented in this Research Topic represent a significant departure from traditional approaches that have long relied on simple surveys and correlational analyses. These new approaches offer researchers powerful tools to uncover the intricate mechanisms underlying parental involvement and its effects on educational outcomes.

In their groundbreaking work, Fisher and Baissberg applied facet theory and demonstrated a particularly innovative research approach that deserves careful attention from the scholarly community. They move beyond conventional survey approaches and systematically map the structural dimensions of parental involvement perceptions using sophisticated analytical techniques. Facet analysis, a methodology rooted in the seminal work of Louis Guttman, reveals fundamental misalignments between Israeli teachers (who hold conceptions that are approximately 30 years old) and parents (who are more accepting of contemporary partnership models). This significant finding suggests that outdated conceptual frameworks remain entrenched in certain educational practices, creating barriers to effective home-school collaboration. The implications of this research extend well-beyond the Israeli context, raising essential questions about whether similar perception gaps exist in other educational systems worldwide.

Gamliel and Kupferberg's research embodies a novel and sophisticated framework for integrating micro-level analysis (including Conversation Analysis and Discursive Psychology) with macro-level analysis (Positive Discourse Analysis). They examined digital parent-teacher forums during crises, a particularly timely focus given the increasing reliance on digital communication platforms in educational settings. Technological advancements have facilitated enhanced communication modalities, enabling real-time information dissemination and virtual engagement between schools and families. Their innovative approach captures both the fine-grained interactional dynamics and broader power structures that shape these communications. The research illuminates how metaphors such as “teachers as fighters” and “parents as critics” shape relationships in ways that traditional research methods consistently miss. This discourse-analytic approach reveals the subtle yet powerful linguistic mechanisms through which roles are constructed and contested in educational settings.

Multiple papers in the Research Topic (Zhou et al., Xiang et al., He and Shi, Wang et al.) employ structural equation modeling (SEM) to reveal hidden mechanisms that simpler statistical approaches cannot detect. This advanced quantitative methodology allows researchers to test complex theoretical models and examine mediating and moderating relationships with precision. The research demonstrates convincingly that simple correlations may hinder the recognition of more complicated relationships that actually drive educational outcomes. For instance, Zhou et al. show how parents' media literacy affects children's learning quality through democratic parenting styles, but crucially, this effect operates only under specific screen-time conditions. Such conditional effects would remain invisible to researchers employing traditional analytical approaches, underscoring the critical importance of methodological sophistication in contemporary educational research.

Theoretical advances

In addition to offering substantial methodological advances, the papers in this Research Topic provide valuable new insights into theory that have the potential to reshape how researchers and practitioners conceptualize parental involvement. Emerging theoretical frameworks underscore the significance of culturally responsive practices, acknowledging the considerable heterogeneity of family structures and sociocultural contexts that characterize contemporary societies. Theoretical boundaries are extended in several key areas: the reconceptualization of parental involvement beyond mere physical presence, the recognition of contextual and cultural specificity in how involvement manifests and functions, and the embrace of stakeholder perspective pluralism that honors multiple voices in educational relationships.

Papers in the Research Topic directly confront and challenge traditional “involvement as participation” models that have dominated the field for decades. Goshin et al. make a crucial theoretical distinction between cooperative agency (which emerges from joint parent-child activity) and autonomous agency (which arises from facilitative parenting that supports children's independent development). This nuanced distinction demonstrates that adaptation to the pandemic's unprecedented effects required different forms of agency that were not revealed by conventional involvement frameworks. The COVID-19 pandemic served as a natural experiment that exposed the limitations of existing theoretical models and pointed toward the need for more dynamic conceptualizations of family-school relationships.

Similarly, McElveen et al. show that communal beliefs about mathematics—not just observable home-based mathematical activities—significantly shape children's mathematical development. This finding highlights the ideological dimensions of parental involvement that are systematically overlooked by behavioral models that focus exclusively on measurable actions. The research suggests that what parents believe about learning may be as important as what they do, opening new avenues for intervention and support programs.

Papers from Chinese (Zhou et al., Kang et al., Xiang et al., Shen, Wang et al., Zhibin et al., He and Shi), Israeli (Fisher and Baissberg), South African (Siziba et al.), and Portuguese (Gramaxo et al.) contexts demonstrate how parental involvement may be expressed in distinctly different ways across diverse cultures and educational traditions. This global breadth is essential for developing theories that can claim genuine generalizability while remaining sensitive to cultural variation. Kang et al.'s tripartite interaction model demonstrates how Chinese parent-child programs can unintentionally restrict children's agency through rigid adult-led IRE (Initiation-Response-Evaluation) patterns that reflect particular cultural assumptions about authority and learning. Meanwhile, Xiang et al. report innovative research showing that grandparental involvement operates through mechanisms distinct from parental involvement, with grandparents providing academic support rather than emotional leisure activities. This finding reflects the multi-generational nature of Chinese families and challenges Western assumptions about the nuclear family as the primary unit of educational support.

Instead of focusing on a single viewpoint, multiple papers deliberately and systematically compare stakeholders' different perceptions. Fisher and Baissberg present a rigorous, systematic comparison illustrating how teachers resist what they perceive as professional interference, whilst parents are simultaneously seeking genuine partnerships. This perception gap represents a significant barrier to effective collaboration that must be addressed through targeted interventions. Barth and Tsemach's stakeholder comparison shows that leadership styles may differentially shape teacher attitudes: participative leadership is a strong predictor of positive attitudes toward involvement, whilst transformational leadership shows no significant effect. This finding directly challenges popular leadership theories that have assumed that transformational approaches are universally beneficial in educational settings.

Contribution to the research topic's purpose

Collectively, the papers assembled here break the mold in parental involvement research by demonstrating convincingly that single research methods cannot adequately capture the full complexity of parental involvement phenomena. The Research Topic shows it is necessary to integrate the rigor and generalizability of quantitative approaches (including SEM and mediation analysis) with the depth and contextual sensitivity of qualitative research (discourse analysis, in-depth interviews) through a stringent theoretical design and sophisticated analysis (such as Facet Theory). This methodological pluralism represents an essential direction for the future of the field.

The Research Topic embodies theoretical complexity and impressive global breadth, incorporating non-Western assumptions and illustrating how involvement in constructing and practicing varies significantly across educational systems with different histories, values, and organizational structures. This evidence strongly suggests that parental involvement is, at least in part, culturally specific and cannot be adequately understood through universalist frameworks developed in any single cultural context. The papers also underscore the importance of incorporating multiple perspectives (including those of parents, teachers, children, and grandparents) rather than conducting research solely within researcher-defined constructs that may not capture participants' lived experience.

Novel approaches presented in this Research Topic encompass parental leadership initiatives that equip guardians with advocacy and mentorship competencies within the educational community, empowering families to become active agents of change. Furthermore, there is an increasing focus on comprehensive family support systems that address extracurricular factors influencing academic performance, recognizing that education cannot be separated from broader social and economic contexts. Educational institutions are exploring adaptive scheduling and home visits to accommodate diverse parental circumstances, reflecting a growing recognition that rigid institutional practices may inadvertently exclude certain families from meaningful participation.

The research presented throughout this Research Topic illustrates the paramount importance of context when attempting to understand parental involvement. This includes crisis conditions such as pandemics and armed conflicts, technological mediation through digital platforms, institutional contexts shaped by policy and leadership decisions, and family structures that vary across cultures and communities. Several papers explicitly develop interventions or provide practical frameworks for turning methodological innovation into meaningful practice that can improve educational outcomes for children and strengthen family-school partnerships.

In conclusion, these progressive strategies aim to cultivate a more inclusive, equitable, and productive educational environment by optimizing parental engagement across diverse populations and contexts. The contents of the papers, taken together, suggest that an innovative methodology must integrate method, theory, and context to reveal previously hidden dimensions of educational relationships and to inform more effective approaches to supporting families in their children's education.

Author contributions

YF: Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing, Conceptualization, Investigation, Methodology, Project administration, Supervision, Validation, Visualization. PH: Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing, Conceptualization, Investigation, Methodology, Project administration, Supervision.

Acknowledgments

The editors would like to thank the contributors to this special edition on groundbreaking methodologies and theories for parental involvement in education.

Conflict of interest

The author(s) declared that this work was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Generative AI statement

The author(s) declared that generative AI was not used in the creation of this manuscript.

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