Volunteering in the school and charity behavior among parents whose children attending in vocational education
Zsófia Kocsis - Anett Rusznák
Abstract
While many international studies focus on parental involvement in pre‑school and primary school, relatively few studies investigate these questions with regard to the secondary schools. Similarly, in Hungary, while the relationship between secondary education and parental involvement has been examined, there is a limited number of studies that have focused on the parental involvement and especially parents' volunteering. Hence, this study is exploratory in nature, and it aims at gathering and analyzing data on parent, whose children are attending in vocational education. Data from a large sample database was used, but the study focuses on both vocational schools that do not offer a certificate of secondary school completion as well as the ones that do offer such a certificate. The research question was: what are the characteristics of parents' volunteering work in vocational education and training institutions? It is assumed that a low participation rate will be observed and that parents volunteer more often in physical activities than in other school activities, and it is also assumed that parents contribute through donations rather than volunteering. The results show that in both types of schools, around half of the parents are not actively involved in volunteering or charity, and almost none of the parents do any physical work as a form of volunteering. However, urban homogeneous families with a tertiary education are more likely to volunteer, while there is a tendency for families from lower socio–cultural backgrounds to be more reluctant in terms of volunteering. In this respect, no significant, systematic barriers were identified, but barriers related to work, childcare, and not knowing how to participate in school activities were highlighted. The objective was to obtain research results relevant to vocational education and the analysis highlighted that more attention is needed in terms of volunteering in this type of schools.
Keywords: parental involvement, volunteer parents, parental volunteering, volunteering in school, parental involvement in secondary school, vocational training, technical college.