Can students accurately answer about the education level of their parents?

ICYMI (In Case You Missed It), the following work was presented at the 2015 Regional Conference of the World Association of Public Opinion Research (WAPOR) in Doha, Qatar.  Linda Kimmel, a researcher at the Institute for Social Research’s Center for Political Studies presented “ Factors influencing the accuracy of student reports of family background: Evidence from the 2012 Qatar Education Study” as part of the session “Questionnaire Design” on Sunday, March 8th, 2015.

Post developed by Linda Kimmel.

Education scholars have long assumed family background to be especially salient in predicting student achievement and student educational aspirations.

Student reporting on family household characteristics is a common practice when conducting school surveys, in order to save on the cost, time, and resources of also interviewing the parents. But this savings comes with a potential quality tradeoff, as oftentimes students misreport this information, especially parental education.

Our paper, with co-authors Brian Hunscher, Jill Wittrock and Kien Trung Le, examines the determinants of misreporting of parent education using survey data from the 2012 Qatar Education Study (QES). Conducted by Qatar University’s Social and Economic Survey Research Institute (SESRI), the study surveys students, parents, teachers, and administrators about their views toward K-12 education in Qatar.

In prior research, age and gender of the student, family structure, closeness to parents, race, student academic achievement, and parent highest level of education have all have been found to be related to the accuracy of the student reports. Our paper adds to this literature by examining two new factors: immigration status and school type. Parent education was included on both the student and parent surveys in the QES, thus allowing us to determine the underlying factors leading to a higher probability of misreporting.

Overall we found relatively high levels of agreement between students and parents about parent education. Students were about as accurate reporting on education for either parent, and while strict agreement indicates that only about 60% of student’s proxy and parent’s self-reports match, this improves by 10% if we use a slightly more forgiving collapsed operationalization of education.

Similar to previous research, student age, whether the father lives at home, and high performing students all contributed to differences in student reports of parental education. We did not find support for a gender effect, contrary to prior findings, and the size of the household and parental involvement with homework did not have an impact.

The influence of school system was significantly different for mother’s education but not for father’s. Arabic Private and Community school students seemed to have stronger agreement on mother’s education than students from Independent and International schools. Students in Community schools, in particular, were far more accurate reporters than children in other school types.

No significant differences in student reports were found between Qatari and non-Qatari students in terms of mother’s education, but difference in father’s education was statistically significant.

Conclusion. If students are able to place their parents into a limited number of education categories with a high level of accuracy, then perhaps student reporting is an acceptable tradeoff in comparison to the additional cost and burden of fielding an additional parent survey. Conversely, if an educational researcher is interested in the marginal effect of more detailed parental education levels, then student reporting may not be acceptable. Knowledge gained from this study and previous work should be of great assistance to researchers in helping decide under which conditions student reports can serve as valid substitutes for parental self-reports.