Parental Information Seeking and Use in School Choice Decision Making

Abstract

One of the most important responsibilities parents take on is deciding where their children will be schooled. Alberta offers the most choices of schooling types in Canada, including public, separate, charter, private and homeschooling (Bosetti & Gereluk, 2016). Parents engage in information seeking to make school choice decisions for their kindergarten- and elementary-aged children. Researchers have looked at why parents choose particular types of schooling, but how parents make school choice decisions is less well-known. I interviewed 10 parents with elementary school-aged children to gain insights into what information they sought when choosing their children’s schools. The purpose of my qualitative case study was to explore:

What information do parents obtain about school choice? From where and from whom do parents derive information about school choice? How do parents use this information in making school choice decisions for their children? I used Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Systems Theory (1979) as a theoretical framework. This framework guided my analysis of sixteen interview transcripts. I structured the information sources and types used by parents into four themes that matched with Bronfenbrenner’s four systems of influence: emotional factors/microsystem; social factors/mesosystem; material factors/exosystem; and cultural factors/macrosystem. As the decision makers, parents were at the center of these four spheres of influence. Parents were active information seekers. They filtered information through their family values when making decisions. Emotional information was the most influential force on parental decision making. These findings are important for educational stakeholders, who want to ensure that information is accessible by and useful to parents.