Mother Involvement in the Education of Children in Addis Ababa Primary Schools: Development and Validation of a Measure

Abstract

Parental involvement in the education of children in school, in and outside of home has been
universally accepted phenomena for children’s utmost academic, social and personality development
since mainly Bronfenbrunner’s (1979) conceptualization of children’s contextual development. In a
country like Ethiopia where raising children is more of traditional, and knowledge emanating from
reputable research findings to change this tradition is scarce, development, validation and
standardization of an instrument for assessing parental involvement in education is a vital endeavor.
Most of the studies made by the graduate students on parenting have been a crude Amharic translation
of the foreign instrument without proper standardization and validation. Development of Amharic
Mother Educational Involvement in Addis Ababa primary school second cycle students has been made
in this study taking the following major stages: observation of schools and review of literature,
development of a pool of items, and correlation and factor analysis. Mother educational involvement
was found to be multidimensional phenomena (using exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis);
with average reliability coefficient of the global scale was .91. While child’s sex was not related to
mothers’ involvement, there was statistically significant correlation between mother educational level,
age and grade of students, and type of schools and mother involvement. Similar to previous theoretical
and empirical studies, as a sign of validity, this instrument come up with the data that mothers are more
involved for younger children, when they have more education and from private schools.