Paper abstract:

This study explores the Azerbaijani immigrant parents’ school involvement in USA schools and their children’s academic achievement. Literature supports that Azerbaijani parents are much involved in school activities as 6 in 10 parents discussed their child’s progress on their initiative, and 55% discussed their child’s progress on the initiative of one of their child’s teachers (OECD, 2019).

A survey adapted from Epstein’s “Six Types of Parent Involvement” and items adjusted from Dr. Gehlbach’s Family-School Relationship Survey (2015) was used to collect the data. The survey comprised four parts (Parenting, Communication, Volunteering, and Collaboration), followed by questions about the children’s academic achievement and demographic questions about parents. The primary research question: “Is there an association between Azerbaijani children’s academic achievement and Azerbaijani parenting support in the U.S.?”

I collected the sample from Azerbaijani-born/ naturalized citizens of Azerbaijani descent. The sample consisted of 55 parents whose children had studied at American schools, K-12, for at least one year. Parents were recruited to participate through a personal acquaintance from multiple states in the U.S. Participants received a WhatsApp invitation to meet a Qualtrics survey link after agreeing. Parents were encouraged to forward the survey link to other parents. Therefore, this study implemented convenience and snowball sampling (Goodman, 1961).

I conducted a Chi-square test of association for the statistical analysis with ordinal independent and dependent variables. Based on the Chi-square test of association, there is no unique effect of type of parental involvement (p > .05) on the academic achievement of Azerbaijani children. This suggests that the mean academic achievement does not differ by type of parental involvement. Therefore, I failed to reject the null hypothesis (no effect or relationship between the variables). I can conclude that Azerbaijani parents’ American school involvement can not affect their children’s academic achievement. These findings align with many of the perspectives that hold immigrant parents incapable of or indifferent to playing a central role in their children’s education as one of the benchmarks for multicultural literacy.