Profiles of Family Engagement in Early Head Start: Associations with Child Outcomes and Parenting Skills

• In Event: 2-211 - It Takes a Village: Exploring the Antecedents, Outcomes and Patterns of Family Engagement in ECE

Integrative Statement

Promoting family engagement has been found to be particularly important for children from low-income families (Ginsburg-Block, Manz, & McWayne, 2010) because it acts as a protective factor mitigating adverse home environments. The role of families and their engagement is even greater in the first three years because it is a critical period for infants and toddlers’ rapid growth and development, vulnerability, and high reliance on adults (Ayoub, Vallotton, & Mastergeorge, 2011). However, less research attention has focused on the role of family engagement for infants and toddlers from low-income families, including investigations of characteristics of families who enroll in different types of ECE programs. Therefore, the current study employed a person-centered approach to 1) identify different sub-groups by shared patterns of family engagement across three dimensions (i.e., home-based involvement, program-based involvement, and parent-program staff relationship) in Early Head Start (EHS) home-based and center-based programs. In addition, we 2) examined how the family engagement classes/memberships in each type of EHS programs were associated with child outcomes and parenting skills at age 3 and the outcome change scores from age 2 to 3.

Method
Data for the present study is from the Early Head Start Family and Child Experiences Study (Baby FACES; Vogel & Boller, 2009-2012). This study included children who participated in either home-based (n=207) or center-based (n=285) programs in EHS for two consecutive years from age 2 and 3. We used multiple variables for family engagement (12 variables), child outcomes (4 variables) and parenting skills (3 variables) and covariates. The present study employed a Latent Profile Analysis (LPA) using Mplus 8.1 to detect underlying latent categorical variable which indicates classes of family engagement for each sub-sample. Further, we used a 3-step approach, (BCH method), to examine profiled classes and child outcomes and parenting skills.

Results and discussion
We found three classes of family engagement for home-based program [ 1) low home-based involvement/ medium program-based involvement/ low parent-program staff relationships (12%), 2) high home-based involvement/low program-based involvement (69%) and 3) high home-based/high program-based involvement (19%)], and center-based programs [( 1) low home-based involvement but high program-based involvement (8%), 2) high home-based involvement but low program-based involvement (50%), 3) high home-based/program-based involvement, and high parent-teacher relationships (41%)]. The findings from the person-centered approach provided explicit heterogeneous classes that showed different patterns of family engagement across dimensions in both home-based and center-based EHS program.

For the home-based programs, the class 2 and 3 demonstrated significantly higher score in engagement/orientation skills than the class 1. For the center-based programs, we found that children in the class 3 were more likely to show lower problem behavior and higher social competence than children in the class 2. Children in both the class 2 and 3 showed higher receptive vocabulary skills than children in the class 1. There is not a significant association between the profiled classes and parenting skills in home-based programs, while we found substantial significant associations between classes and parenting skills in center-based programs (see Table 1-1, 1-2). Results will be further discussed.

Authors

• Shinyoung Jeon, University of Oklahoma-Tulsa
  Presenting Author

• Kyong-Ah Kwon, University of Oklahoma
  Non-Presenting Author

• Shannon Guss, Early Childhood Education Institute (ECEI) at University of Oklahoma-Tulsa
  Non-Presenting Author

• Diane Horm, University of Oklahoma, Tulsa
  Non-Presenting Author