This paper examines the difference between adolescents’ perception of parents’ educational expectations and their own, and the role of parental involvement in developing adolescents’ educational expectations. The sample was drawn from the fifth cycle of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) in 2012. About 3,000 Hong Kong 15 year-old students participated in the longitudinal study by completing the questionnaire. Using a logistic regression model, we investigated to what extent and how parental expectations and involvement were related to Hong Kong adolescents’ expectations for pursuing a university degree. The effects of individual characteristics (i.e., gender and cognitive ability) and family background (i.e., family structure and SES) were controlled in the model. Results indicated that perceived and actual parental expectations were important predictors shaping adolescents’ educational expectations even after the academic and socio-economic backgrounds of adolescents were taken into account. The model also suggested that less privileged adolescents might be able to overcome their socio-economic disadvantages in achieving high educational attainment if a parent was involved in helping them to make educational plans. The importance of family interventions – in particular, home-based communication between parents and adolescents – is discussed in this paper. Copyright © 2014 INET.

Existing research largely built on Pierre Bourdieu’s social reproduction theory to explain the structural constraints for inequality access to higher education. Much less has applied Amartya Sen’s capability approach, addressing the agency of “capability to aspire” for differential post-secondary education transitions. The data are from the PISA 2012 and the longitudinal study of adolescents in Hong Kong, consisted of 2741 senior year secondary students from 123 schools. Results show that the reproduction effects are still in effect to transmission of cultural and social capital, leading to shape post-secondary education transitions. Yet, adolescents’ likelihood of expecting to pursue a bachelor degree are increased through strengthening their own capabilities after taking into account of socioeconomic backgrounds. Copyright © 2017 All Academic, Inc.

Parents as the primacy agent of socialization are important to influence students’ educational pathways they are undertaken after compulsory education. Past studies have found that parents’ social status and family resources have intertwined effect on the differential patterns of educational expectation between students from different socio-cultural milieu. Those studies indicated that students from high socioeconomic background with more family resources are more likely expecting to pursue university degree than those of low socioeconomic groups. Parental involvement, as one of family cultural socialization exists in different forms, is conducive to support their children in their process of navigation to post-secondary education.The present paper attempts to link these three dimensions of family factors – family socioeconomic status, family resources and parental involvement, and to study their relationships with adolescents’ expectations to reach post-secondary education. The data were drawn from a recent longitudinal study which was an extension of PISA 2021. A total of 3,000 students aged 15 years in Hong Kong have participated in the subsequent survey. The logistic regression model was deployed to address the research question: to what extent family socioeconomic background, family resources and parental involvement predict students’ expectation of pursuing university degree. In particular, the relative contributions of different forms of parental involvement were clarified while student academic background was also controlled.The results affirm the persistence of inequalities on structural regularities that are linked to parents’ occupation and cultural possession. Nevertheless, the role of parent involvement in social communication with their children has significant relationship with students’ expectation on going to university, regardless of parent’s social status, family resource and student’s academic background. The findings may pose the need to strengthen