Parental Involvement and Family Motivational Climate as Perceived by Children: A Cross-cultural Study

Abstract

The culture of a country may influence parental involvement in a student’s learning, making it more or less adequate. To test this possibility, this study analyzes the cross-cultural validity of the learning-oriented Family Motivational Climate model (FMC) as an index of parental involvement in students’ academic job and the FMC questionnaire (FMC-Q), as a way of operationalizing it. A total of 583 Spanish and 448 Cuban students filled in the FMC-Q and the questionnaire of perceived motivational changes resulting from parental practices. Confirmatory, cross-validation, and multi-group factor analyses revealed that the model showed a good fit to the data, both in the Spanish and in the Cuban samples. Besides, FMC predicted the 74% of the variance of students’ motivational change. However, the results also revealed differences between the two samples in the FMC model set up, as Spanish and Cuban students did not put down the same significance to several indicators of the model. These facts imply the need to take cultural differences into account when designing interventions aimed at changing parental involvement practices.

Keywords

• parental involvement
• family motivational climate
• learning motivation
• success expectancies
• children’s satisfaction