Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2007, Educational Policy and Leadership

While its importance and impact on students and schools has been the focus of much research, as a construct unto itself, parent volunteerism has received very little attention. In fact, there is no clear agreement as to what constitutes parent volunteerism or even an understanding as to what types of jobs are generally considered to be parent volunteer activities. Moving toward a definition, this study presents an ontology of four different subgroups of parents and how they elect to participate in either high risk or low risk volunteer activities for educational organizations. High risk activities include those tasks or jobs in which parent volunteers have access to sensitive student information, or assume responsibility for school-aged children, school-owned equipment, or government property. Low risk activities include those that typically do not place children, the school, or the volunteer in legal jeopardy. Each ontology contains three coefficients representing the relationship between the attributes for personal time availability, socio-economic status, and social and cultural capital and either High Risk volunteer tasks or Low Risk activities. Using Structural Equation Modeling of data taken from the Special Volunteer Supplement of the Current Population Survey of 2005 reveals that parent's time availability and socio-economic status are not significant predictors of their self-determinations of the activities they performed as volunteers. On the other hand, social and cultural capital is a very strong predictor, especially for minority mothers. Other findings show that parents consider their volunteer activities as being strongly task-oriented, that fathers engage in more activities dealing directly with children, while mothers engage in more social activities such as serving on committees.

Committee: William Loadman (Advisor) Subjects: Education, Administration