Measuring Parental Aspirations & Expectations in the
California Health Interview Survey
Summary of call June 21, 2016 3:45 – 5:00 pm
7/22/16
Chair: Sue Holtby, Public Health Institute
Participants:
Fernando Mendoza, Stanford University, Department of Pediatrics
Lynne Huffman, Stanford University, Department of Pediatrics
Duncan Lawrence, Director, Immigration Policy Lab, Stanford University
Estela Zarate, Associate Professor, Education Department, California State University, Fullerton
The call opened with introductions and Sue went over the purpose of call:
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Provide an overview of the California Health Interview Survey (CHIS).
Provide an overview of the desired data.
Discuss measurement issues.
Review possible questions to field on CHIS 2017-2018
Get advice from the group on the best approach for CHIS.
Overview of CHIS. Sue gave an overview of CHIS, which was provided in more detail in a document sent
out prior to the call. CHIS is a general population telephone survey that has been conducted in two-year
cycles since 2001. CHIS is fielded in approximately 40,000 CA households each cycle, with separate
adult, teen and child interviews conducted in each household. The sample of children ages 0-11 years is
approximately 4,500-5,500 per cycle, roughly evenly divided between 0-5 year olds and 6-11
year olds.
Questionnaire development for CHIS is done every two years, when some questions go off the survey
and new questions come on. CHIS staff is currently planning for CHIS 2017-2018, and is exploring the
possibility of fielding questions that measure parental aspirations and expectations for their child’s
educational attainment.
Measuring parental aspirations and expectations on CHIS. Fernando talked about the large, diverse CHIS
sample size, which allows us to analyze data by race/ethnicity, immigrant status and other
demographics. Since its inception, the CHIS child survey has focused on health conditions, health
insurance and health behaviors, such as diet and physical activity. Childhood obesity has been a public
health concern for several years, and CHIS data are used to measure progress in reducing obesity among
children in California. While these topics are important in monitoring child health in the population,
Fernando would like to see CHIS go beyond standard health measures, and include questions that
capture parents’ long-term expectations for their children. As a pediatrician, Fernando is concerned
about the high dropout rate among Latino high school students, and how parental expectations affect
children’s academic success. As chair of the Technical Advisory Committee for the CHIS child survey,
Fernando is encouraging CHIS staff to view health in broad terms since we know that low educational
achievement is correlated with poor health outcomes in adults. As he put it, “I would rather have an
obese high school graduate than a thin dropout.”
The large and diverse CHIS child sample can provide much-needed data on differences in parental
attitudes and behaviors. For example, Fernando co-authored an article based on CHIS data that looked
at disparities in book sharing among immigrant families. They found that daily book sharing was
significantly lower among immigrant parents than among native-born parents, and that the lowest rate
was in Hispanic families with two foreign-born parents. He asked the other group members for their
thoughts.
Lynne’s interest is in developmental-behavioral pediatrics, with a focus on early identification of
behavioral problems, particularly among children with special needs. She has also conducted research
on emergent literacy and school readiness. Duncan’s work is on immigration and integration issues,
which he addresses from a political and policy perspective. The Stanford Immigration Policy Lab does
evaluation studies of the impact of immigration on families. They conduct surveys of hard-to-reach
populations, such as undocumented immigrants. Both Lynne and Duncan expressed support for
measuring parental aspirations and expectations on CHIS, but noted that they do not have experience
fielding such questions.
Estela is an education researcher with a focus on the Latino immigrant experience. She was a coresearcher on a longitudinal study of Latino immigrant families in the Los Angeles area, looking at the
predictors of academic achievement over children’s elementary and secondary school careers. She and
her colleagues found that parental expectations are based on the child’s school performance, not the
other way around, as most people believe. When a child performs well in school, parents’ expectations
are high, and when a child does not perform well, the expectations drop.
Measurement issues
• Aspirations vs. expectations: Estela explained that aspirations and expectations are two distinct
constructs: aspirations tend to remain high and relatively constant over time, whereas expectations
show much more variability. Most parents hope their child will succeed, and that hope remains
relatively constant over time, even when a child’s school performance is not at a high level.
Expectations, on the other hand, are primarily based on the child’s school performance. Estela
emphasized the importance of measuring both aspirations and expectations.
• Lowest age for which measures have predictive value: Estela summarized the education research
on the age at which we start to see variability in parental expectations—not until after third grade.
The most variability is in the teen years, when the majority of children have established their school
performance levels, and parents’ expectations have been formed by past actions.
Since the goal is to identify questions for the CHIS child questionnaire, the fact that variability does
not become significant until about age 10 means that we would have a small sample size to analyze.
Estela said that one possibility for CHIS would be to ask the parent about the child’s enthusiasm for
school. This could be asked of the younger ages and could be an indicator of future performance.
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Focus on academic success only or include other types of success e.g. in business, the arts,
income-earning expectations? Sue asked the group if they thought we should try to measure
expectations more broadly than just academic success. For example, we could ask parents if they
expect their child to be successful in business, the arts or earning a good living, in addition to
expected level of educational attainment. The group thought this was an interesting possibility, but
we have not identified any tested questions. For Fernando, academic expectations are the most
important, and we should be thinking about data that can be used to inform efforts to engage
immigrant parents in their children’s education.
Criteria for selecting questions for CHIS. Sue went over the criteria that CHIs staff use when considering
measures for CHIS:
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Tested and validated
Suitable for population-based telephone survey
Short—no more than 6 items
Able to measure variability in sub-sample of children < 12 years
Review questions and advise staff on best questions for CHIS. We reviewed the questions that Sue and
Estela provided to the group. Sue’s came from a literature review, and Estela’s are from her research.
The questions are all similar and ask about the highest level of education that the parent expects his or
her child to achieve.
The group felt that since prior research indicates that we are not going to get the kind of predictive data
we are hoping for on the CHIS child survey, that we should consider alternatives. One alternative would
be to ask the parents of high school students in CHIS about their expectations for their child, which
would mean adding a question to the CHIS adult survey. Another option would be to increase the
number of questions we ask about learning-related behavior, like the book sharing question, to get
more insight into how parents engage with their child around learning.
Estela also suggested that we consider questions on school-related behaviors, such as child absences
and participation in teacher/parent meetings, and perception such as the child’s eagerness to go to
school and how well the parent knows the teacher and principal.
We agreed to consult with other researchers in the field to see if they have recommendations on other
approaches for the CHIS child survey.