Response disagreements between parents and children in surveys on family and education

Authors

Carmuca Gómez-Bueno Universidad de Granada

Enrique Martín-Criado Universidad Pablo de Olavide

DOI

10.4438/1988-592X-RE-2020-388-445

Abstract

Surveys on family and education usually ask parents. Would results change if we ask children? To answer this question, we analyze the disagreements between parents and children’s answers to 16 questions asked in the 2010 Social Survey in Andalusia. This survey asks parents and children from two cohorts of 12 and 16 years old. To measure disagreement we calculate the simple agreement coefficient, the Kappa coefficient and the Intraclass Correlation Coefficient. Afterwards we compare, with crosstabs, parents and children’s responses to similar questions, controlling by parents’ studies. The main result is that disagreements are not large, but they have big consequences: when we control by parents’ studies we obtain very different results depending on whom we ask -parents or children-. When we ask parents, higher social strata’s practices appear more in compliance with the legitimate discourse on children’s education and the differences in these practices between social strata are more often statistically significant. We hypothesize that this is due to two facts: social desirability bias is bigger in parents than in children and this bias acts in different directions in the different social strata.

Keywords

Sociology of Education, Educational Practices, Parent Student Relationship, Social Class, Surveys, Validity, Social Desirability.