The Correlation Between Father Involvement and The Academic Achievement of Their Children: Meta-Analysis

Abstract

Parental involvement is an important factor in students’ achievement, and numerous studies have shown that it increases students’ success. As research on father’s involvement has become one of the current topics in education today, there is a need to separate the effect exercised by fathers from the overall family one. The aim of this study is to synthesize various studies which have focused on different aspects of fathers’ involvement; therefore, a meta-analysis would be an ideal method to create a synthesis of these perspectives and provide one general measure of fathers’ involvement effect. Nine studies have been included in the meta-analysis, where fathers’ involvement has been operationalized through father’s involvement in: education of children at school and at home, psychosocial well-being of children, modelling of behavior and leisure activities. The results show that the total measure of effect size differs from zero after applying the fixed model (z=13.510, p=0.000) and the random effect model (z=4.588, p=0.000), that is, there is a statistically significant positive correlation between the involvement of fathers and the academic success of their children. The value of the heterogeneity test (Q=66.560, df=8, p=.000, I2=87.981) indicates that the overall effect can be viewed according to the assumptions of the random effects model. The conducted meta-analysis has confirmed the assumption that fathers’ involvement is positively related to children’s academic performance.