Relationships between School and Family: The Adolescents' Perspective

Abstract

The study describes, conceptualizes and tries to explain the present status of the school-family relationships from the adolescents' perspective. It is a part of the research carried out within the grant entitled Partnerships School-Family-Community. A Case Study in the County of Alba project which is in the process of development. Our purpose was to find out what perceptions, representations and behavioral patterns the adolescents have towards their parents' involvement in education and towards the relationships between school and family, in the political and socio-economical context of Romania during the transition period to a democratic society. The specificity of the proposed theme employs mainly interpretative research principles and the research design clearly shows details from the participants' perspective. I used the focus group technique, recommended for obtaining substantial data from teenagers. The collected data was analyzed using the techniques and procedures of Grounded Theory and the software package ATLAS.ti 5.0. The research confirms that adolescents have a different perspective than their parents on the family's style of education, on the attitudes and behaviors in school-family-community relations; all these influence their reactions and ultimately, their psycho-social development. Considering the overlapping spheres of influence theory, the representations that the student has acquired in high school overlap with the representations of his/her family experience, thus providing him/her with a new and broader horizon of understanding of the family microcosm in relation to the school and community environment. URN: urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs0701208