Deeper Dive Determine what you will measure through your survey

Define parent involvement

As you think about what you want to measure through your survey, you must decide how to define parent involvement, thinking carefully and identifying the factors that indicate whether and to what degree a parent could be considered to be involved. For example, does parent involvement include only attending individualized education program (IEP) meetings, or does it also require working with school staff to develop their child’s IEP? Is there a certain level of involvement that your state is looking for?

Defining key concepts and terms is one of the most important tasks when developing or modifying a survey because your definitions will determine what you are trying to measure, endorse a common understanding among all individuals involved in the data collection process, and provide an organizing structure to help guide your efforts.

As you work, you may want to engage stakeholders and investigate models of parent involvement to see if any resonate with your state’s context. Keep in mind that you can modify existing models to fit your state’s own characteristics and needs (see Box 8 for examples of parent involvement frameworks). It is important, however, that you ensure that your state’s definition is consistent with the intent of Indicator B8.

Box 8

Examples of parent involvement frameworks

Operationalize parent involvement

Once your state has defined parent involvement, you will need to operationalize the definition, which means providing additional detail about your definition so that it is specific and can be measured. For example, say your definition of parent involvement includes parents working with school staff to develop their child’s IEP and attending IEP meetings. To operationalize the definition, you need to specify:

• How many IEP meetings parents should attend
  • Any?
  • All?
  • A specific percentage (e.g., 80%)?
  • Other: ?
• What it means for parents to “work with school staff to develop their child’s IEP”
  • Discussing plans for the IEP with school staff?
  • Reviewing the draft IEP and providing feedback?
  • Co-creating the IEP along with the school staff?
  • Other: ?

You should operationalize all key concepts (such as “facilitating parent involvement as a means of improving services and results for children with disabilities”) that your state is measuring through your parent involvement survey. This will help you create survey items that align with your operational definition.

Here are some questions you might ask when thinking about how to operationalize parent involvement:

• What does parent involvement mean in the context of my state?
• What does parent involvement look like in practice?
• Does parent involvement include elements of quantity (e.g., the number of times parents attend meetings) as well as quality (e.g., the extent to which parents participate during those meetings)?
• How will we know whether parent involvement is happening? (i.e., what indicators can we use to measure parent involvement?)

A key part of the process of operationalizing your definition is determining which indicators of parent involvement you can actually measure. It might be possible to devise a very specific operational definition, but if you cannot feasibly measure that indicator through your survey or other data collections, then the definition will not be helpful.

Develop a framework for the survey

Another important part of determining what you will measure is developing a framework for the survey that includes

• The item topics (i.e., what you will ask)
• The target population of interest (i.e., who you will ask)
• The mode of administration (e.g., how you will ask them)

Item Topics

In the Reach section of this toolkit, we discussed how you can go beyond Indicator B8 to make the most of your parent involvement data. You should include items in your survey that will enable you to answer the different questions your state has about parent involvement. However, while it may be tempting to have your survey cover all possible aspects of parent involvement, we strongly recommend that you focus on those questions that are the most important to your state. Focusing your survey on a smaller number of important questions will help you to conserve resources (e.g., it will save time if your team does not have to analyze extensive amounts of data), reduce respondent burden, and potentially increase your response rates. Further, if you plan to do additional data collection activities (e.g., observations or interviews), you can focus the activities on gathering more in-depth data, as needed.

Target Population

As we discussed in the section on selecting the group who will participate in data collection, you need to decide if you want to focus your parent involvement data collection activities only on obtaining data from parents, or if you want to include additional stakeholders (e.g., district or school staff) as well. Think about who you want to survey and determine how you will select the survey sample. Keep in mind that if you are using more than one method to collect data (e.g., surveys and interviews), you might have different samples for each method. For more information on sampling, see the additional resources on sampling.

Mode of Administration

In the section on creating data collection procedures and tools, we talked about two basic modes of survey administration: online surveys and paper surveys. See that section for important considerations related to the survey mode.