Chinese parents' preference for private secondary school in Sandakan

The main purpose of this dissertation is to determine the phenomenon of parental preference for private secondary school in Sandakan. The study also examines the main criterion of Chinese parents in Sandakan for sending their children to a certain secondary school and the relation of some demographic factors of the Chinese parents with the school choice perception. The population is consisted 300 Chinese parents or guardians of the children in a private secondary school. Convenience sampling was used to select 300 parents from the private school by the help of the principal and the form teachers. A questionnaire was used as an instrument to collect data. The instrument was validated and reliability coefficient was found that the Cronbach's Alpha value is 0.869. The results were analysed using the frequency counts, percentages, t-tests, Pearson Correlation and One-Way ANOVA by the SPSS 19.0 for windows program. The findings revealed some factors such as the academic performance, the quality and quantity of staff, the physical facilities, the curriculum standard, the cost-effectiveness and the quality of output as the responsible concepts of the Chinese parental preference for private secondary schools. Besides, some of the demographic factors of the parents do not show much relation to the parental preference for private secondary schools. In addition, this research is better to be done by using both the quantitative and qualitative research methods as both methods have their own strengths