Experiences and perceptions of parents of youth with disabilities toward school-based parent engagement strategies

ABSTRACT

Youth with disabilities continue to show poor in-school and post-school outcomes. Parent engagement remains as one key component to bring about positive outcomes in youth with disabilities. Despite schools' widely adapted strategies on parent engagement, parent perceptions on various parent engagement strategies is largely unknown. The purposes of this dissertation were (a) to identify parents' experiences and perceptions on the school-based parent engagementpractices in secondary transition, and (b) to understand the facilitators and barriers of parent engagement strategies for engaging parents of youth with disabilities. Using a nonprobability snowball sampling, this cross-sectional mixed-method survey study included 642 parents of youth with disabilities (ages 14-21) across the United States. Each parent reported their experience and perceived helpfulness toward each school-based parent engagement strategy, on a 5-point Likert scale, ranging from 1 (rarely experienced/not at all helpful) to 5 (always/extremely helpful). On average, participants reported they "sometimes" experienced each of the 23 strategies with the lowest rated strategies being (a) discussion of cultural values and beliefs and (b) connecting with service providers or agencies. Across the race/ethnicity groups, resultsrevealed racial differences in the perceptions of parents of youth with disabilities in secondary transition on the 23 school-based parent engagement strategies across five domains knowledge and skills, communication, collaboration, relationships, and culturally responsive practice. Compared to parents of non-Hispanic White, parents of color reported lower scores across all five school-based parent engagement domains for both experiences and perceived usefulness. Toidentify further thoughts regarding parents' perceptions toward parent engagement, deductive, inductive, and thematic analysis of three open-ended questions uncovered four major themes pertaining to facilitators and barriers of parent engagement. The four themes included home-based factors, school-based factors, system-based factors, and existing situations (i.e., children's disabilities/characteristics, family's work, lack of transportation, time conflict, COVID-19, andweather). Implications for practice, limitations, and suggestions for future research are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved)