UC Santa Barbara

Parental engagement is impacted by a plethora of factors. Using a large internationalsample involving countries and regions from Asia, Europe, and Latino America, the first half of this research investigates the association between parental engagement and family-school cultural congruity using the BCH approach for Latent Class Analysis (LCA). The findings from Study 1 confirm that family-school cultural continuity is associated with level of parental engagement in schools. Parents actively participating in all engagement opportunities are more likely to show high family-school cultural congruity. On the contrary, parents who are less engaged in all engagement opportunities usually are the parents who experience lower levels of cultural congruity between home and school. The parents who participate in some forms of opportunities but not the others show different cultural congruity profiles. Moreover, lower-educated parents are less likely to question the services they received. In light of these findings, ongoing efforts are needed to address disparities in the school engagement experiences of culturally different families, especially families from less educated backgrounds. Study 1 points to the importance of a more comprehensive conceptualization of family-school cultural congruity and thus, leads to the research endeavor of the establishment of a cross-cultural cultural congruity scale, which is the focus of Study 2. Study 2 shows satisfactory measurement invariance of the School Cultural Congruity Scale (SCCS) between China and U.S., which makes it possible for mean-based research comparison regarding family-school cultural congruity across these two countries.