Teachers’ Attitudes Towards Collaboration with Parents: Development and Evaluation of the Questionnaire

Anka Jurčević Lozančić, Sanja Basta and Ivan Šerbetar

Summary:  The interest in research on collaboration with parents is becoming more apparent as family engagement changes. Such engagement is conditioned by the family’s interest in changing its position in general and in becoming involved in the curriculum of the educational institution. The questionnaire was constructed and carried out in order to evaluate teachers’ attitudes regarding collaboration with parents. Exploratory factor analysis was employed on a sample of 545 school and preschool teachers. Factor structure was established using principal component analysis, and a three-factor solution was obtained, explaining 42% of the variance, cumulatively. The extracted components supported previous theoretical underpinnings about three dimensions—parental involvement in education, teacher competences for working with parents and expectations from collaboration—which may shed light on the teacher-parent partnership. The Cronbach’s alphas for those dimensions were .833, .854 and .633, respectively. In the second part of the study, a confirmatory factor analysis, using a new sample (N = 268), was administered on the three-factor model of the data. With the exception of significant χ2’s (371.41; p < .01), all other indices of fit of the respecified model indicated a close fit of the data to the model, which was demonstrated by the indices of χ2/df = 1.89, while the RMSEA with a 90% confidence interval was 0.057 [CI 0.048 - 0.066], the NNFI reached a value of 0.94 and the CFI was 0.95. The results provide guidelines for improving initial teacher education and point to the knowledge and skills needed for empowering preschool and primary school teachers in their collaboration with parents.