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Examining the relationship between parent/carer's attitudes, beliefs and their child's future participation in physics

Jones, K.L.; Hamer, J.J.

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Authors

Profile image of Karen Jones

Karen Jones karen.jones@durham.ac.uk
Senior Evaluation and Monitoring Manager

J.J. Hamer



Abstract

Despite girls enjoying and being good at physics, the proportion of girls studying physics and going into physics related careers still lags behind that of boys. A large volume of research exists on the factors related to the uptake of girls into physics, however little research looks at the link between parents and their child’s physics uptake. Research shows that children’s attitudes towards physics correlate strongly with their parents’ attitudes, but more research is needed. The evidence presented here moves the research forward by modelling a number of parental attitudes and background characteristics to establish the strength of association with their child participating in physics in the future. It also develops validated scales for use with parents and suggestions for interventions to establish causality. 2,049 parents and carers of 13/14 year old children in England completed the survey. The findings indicate that parents who enjoyed physics, consider physics useful for getting a job and judge their child as academic, have the strongest associations with their child’s future participation in physics. Other key variables include the parent valuing physics, the parent attending school outside of the UK, the child being a boy and parents judging daughters as courageous and/or determined.

Citation

Jones, K., & Hamer, J. (2022). Examining the relationship between parent/carer's attitudes, beliefs and their child's future participation in physics. International Journal of Science Education, 44(2), 201-222. https://doi.org/10.1080/09500693.2021.2021457

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Dec 18, 2021
Online Publication Date Jan 31, 2022
Publication Date 2022
Deposit Date Jan 21, 2022
Publicly Available Date Mar 30, 2022
Journal International Journal of Science Education
Print ISSN 0950-0693
Electronic ISSN 1464-5289
Publisher Taylor and Francis Group
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 44
Issue 2
Pages 201-222
DOI https://doi.org/10.1080/09500693.2021.2021457
Public URL https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1217324

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Published Journal Article (2.6 Mb)
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Publisher Licence URL
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Copyright Statement
© 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.






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