Last Updated on October 18, 2026 by Karl Thompson
Parents are the biggest influence on pupils at home, especially in their early years. This post looks at why sociologists of education want to research parents, and the problems they face when they try. It is written for the Methods in Context question on AQA Paper 1 (7192/1), where parents are one of the research contexts the mark scheme rewards you for applying.
Researching in education Pupils · Teachers · Parents · Classrooms · Issues in schools How to use these in the exam: How to Answer Methods in Context Questions
Why research parents?
Parents can influence a child’s attitude towards education in various ways:
- the amount of time they spend reading with their children in the early years
- how they play with their children more generally, and how educational that play is
- how strictly they enforce rules
- the importance they attach to education themselves
- the amount of interest they show in their child’s education
As a result of early socialisation, children end up either culturally deprived or with cultural capital (or somewhere in between). That means they arrive at school either ill-prepared or very well prepared, which makes an enormous difference to how well they adapt to school life when they first start.
Even if you wish to research pupils rather than parents, you may well need parents’ consent, so some minimal contact may be necessary even if it’s not them you are actually researching.
Problems of researching parents
Validity issues
Middle-class, pro-school parents are more likely to want to take part in research about education. They will be more interested, and will probably be able to use it as an opportunity for self-validation: they can show off how much they care about their children’s education. They will also be more familiar with filling in questionnaires and taking part in social research, which are quite ‘middle-class’ pursuits.
Working-class parents, who perhaps didn’t have such a positive experience of school themselves, might be more reluctant to take part, feeling less comfortable dealing with middle-class researchers.
Parents may also use impression management with researchers, exaggerating their involvement in their children’s education, for example, because this paints them in a more positive light.
Practical problems
Gaining access to parents could be difficult. If you don’t want to hang around the school gates or at parents’ evenings, you would have to approach them at home or by phone or email.
Getting parents’ home addresses is going to be difficult, because schools will not share that data with you under data protection law (GDPR). So if you wanted a representative sample by postcode, you wouldn’t be able to get one.
Schools might agree to send out questionnaires, or letters asking for interviewees, to parents on your behalf. HOWEVER, you then have the problem of a self-selecting, biased sample: the chances are that only pro-education parents would want to take part.
It could be very difficult to gain access to the parents of traditionally underachieving groups, such as white working-class parents or Gypsy, Roma and Traveller parents.
It would also be more difficult to get parents together in a group to research them (and this might be pointless anyway), so you’d probably have to do one-to-one research, which is more time-consuming.
Ethical issues
Questions about parenting are sensitive. Parents may feel judged, especially if the research is about why their child is underachieving, so researchers need to be careful about how questions are worded, and to guarantee anonymity and confidentiality. Parents also have the right to refuse consent for their children to take part in research, which can make the pupil side of a study harder to carry out too.
How this comes up in the exam
In a Methods in Context answer, the item will often tell you who is being researched. If it’s parents, you get application marks for linking the method to the points above: access, self-selection, impression management and the class gap in who takes part.
For a worked example, see Evaluate the strengths and limitations of using questionnaires to investigate the role of parents in pupils’ achievement, and Using Surveys to Research Education for questionnaires with parents more generally.
Signposting
This post has been written primarily for students studying research methods in context, as part of the AQA’s A-level Sociology course.
It is one of five posts on research contexts in education: Researching Pupils, Researching Teachers, Researching in Classrooms and Issues Surrounding Researching in Schools cover the others.
For an AQA answer awarded full marks on using structured interviews to investigate family influence on achievement, see Methods in Context Questions: A Full Mark Answer from the AQA.
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