Article Analysis and Critique
In this paper, two articles related to child development and their relationships to parental involvement are being discussed. The objective is to provide a summary of both articles, to compare and contrast them, and to suggest possible directions for further research identified upon reviewing each article.
The first article titled “Parent Involvement, Parental Depression, and Program Satisfaction Among Low-Income Parents Participating in a Two-Generation Early Childhood Education Program” by LaForett and Mendez (2010) discusses parental depression and involvement as predictors of satisfaction in early childhood development programs. Assuming that factors of decreased efficacy, reduced energy and interpersonal difficulties affect involvement in school-based activities and communication with teacher, authors recruited low-income African American parents participating in Head Start intervention program for research purposes. The prevalence of chronic depressive syndromes, their impact on parent involvement and potential reference to satisfaction with intervention program services has been outlined as research questions. The research method was based on interviews with qualified assessors, who collected demographic information and answers pertaining the above research conditions.
Participant’s responses related to depressive syndromes were measured against 12 indicators of depressive symptomatology, adapted from Center for Epidemiologic Studies–Depression scale. A Family-Involvement Questionnaire was used to validate the second research questions, evaluating participant’s behavior in home, school, and home–school conferencing settings. Finally, a 4-point Likert scale has been used to measure the satisfaction with Head Start intervention program, where higher scores represented higher satisfaction level across child and family-scale and teacher scale. LaForett and Mendez (2010) outlined the following research results. First, it was identified that 39% of families involved have reported moderate or severe depressive symptoms through a certain or whole period of the Head Start year. Second, it was found that never depressed parents had higher school activity involvement scores comparing to their peers from sometimes and chronically depressed groups based on scores calculated through one-way variance analysis. For the last research question, all mentioned involvement indicators significantly predicted satisfaction with the child’s teacher above and beyond the influence of depression syndromes demonstrated by their parents. Authors concluded that depressive syndromes are related to parental involvement, posing threat to potential of accessing benefits related to parent involvement and requiring more focus on partnership strategies to support child development among low-income families.
Similarly to the study by LaForett and Mendez, Kenney (2012) explored parental influence on child development, but used more broad data available from National Survey of Children Health collected through the extended period of time. Kenney’s study addressed the impact of parent-initiated children’s play activities on their cognitive, physical, and social/emotional well-being, taking into consideration larger dataset. Kenney (2012) analyzed the amount of parent-reported days spent in activities like singing to, reading to, peer playing and taking outside against covariates in child, family and neighborhood dimensions, as well as demographics. Author used linear regression as her primary data analysis method.
On a child level, it was …
