A multidimensional look at immigrant Latin American immigrant family involvement in education

The purpose of this study was to further examine the area of parent involvement with a Latin American immigrant elementary sample. Specifically, this study examined the Spanish translated version of a previously validated parent involvement scale (i.e., FIQ-E; Manz, Fantuzzo, & Power, 2004) with Latin American immigrant primary caregivers of elementary students in grades Kindergarten through 5th grade. In addition, once the Spanish FIQ-E was found to be a valid measure, an exploratory analysis was conducted to determine if there were key family demographic characteristics that differentiated family involvement on the Spanish FIQ-E constructs. Participants in this study were 408 primary caregivers of Latin American immigrant elementary-age children attending Kindergarten through 5 th grades in one rural and two urban communities in the Midwestern United States. The FIQ-E was professionally translated to Spanish by the original developer of the scale (Manz et al., 2004) and provided for use with this study. Results indicated a two factor structure was supported by Varimax rotation yielding dimensions of family involvement in children\u27s education similar to two of the three previously demonstrated dimensions found in earlier studies: Home-School Communication and Home-Based Involvement. The dimension of School-Based Involvement was not interpretable as only two items remained within the factor (i.e., I take my child to school ; I pick my child up after school ). In addition, key characteristics were examined for differences among multiple dimensions of family involvement including the primary caregiver\u27s reported length of time spent in the United States, reported level of English proficiency, income level, educational attainment, and marital status. A significant negative correlation was found between the length of time a family reported living in the United States and the construct of Home-Based Involvement. Significant differences in Home-School Communication were found for primary caregivers who reported speaking no English relative to those who reported the ability to speak not well, well, and very well. Finally, significantly more Home-School Communication and Home-Based Involvement was found for primary caregivers who had at least a high school diploma as compared with those with less than a high school diploma. Implications for the present investigation as well as limitations and directions for future research are also discussed