Record: Eloise de Carvalho and Yvonne Skipper, “‘We’re Not Just Sat at Home in Our Pyjamas!’: A Thematic Analysis of the Social Lives of Home Educated Adolescents in the UK” in European Journal of Psychology of Education 34(2019): 501-516. [Abstract here]
Summary: A former lecturer at Keele University of London and now a senior lecturer of psychology at the University of Glasgow, Dr. Yvonne Skipper primarily researches social influences on learning. Eloise de Carvalho is pursuing her masters degree in educational psychology at the University of Bristol. Here the authors present the results of a qualitative study of three UK adolescent home educated girls and their mothers, looking especially at the socializaiton experiences of these older children.
They begin with an orientation to home education in the UK. In 2017 a count of 86 out of 152 local councils found there to be 29,805 registered home educators. It is likely that nationwide the figure is 50,000 or higher. They also give us a brief orientation to the literature on socialization, noting that most of it comes from the United States, is concerned with younger children, and tends to rely on surveys filled out by homeschooling parents, who have been shown to rate their own children much higher than other parents do, perhaps because homeschoolers are so sensitive about the socialization issue. de Carvalho and Skipper wanted to study older, British children and to do so in a way that would allow deeper insight into the socialization process than simple surveys can provide.
The next section details their methodology. They obtained a convenience sample of three home educated older girls, age 11, 13, and 15, all of whom responded to an internet-based request to participate in the study. The researchers gave each girl a two-week social interaction diary to record every experience they had with another person outside of their immediate family that was longer than 10 minutes. After the two weeks each girl was interviewed for about 40 minutes. Each mother was given a reflection sheet prior to being interviewed. The interviews were recorded and analyzed using the popular approach of Braun and Clarke.
Analysis revealed three important categories. First, the girls, two of whom had had negative experiences in schools prior to home education (one because of Autism Spectrum Disorder, the other due to school bullying), all described positively the rich community life they enjoyed both in their families and with other home educated children. Home education networks are often less effective at providing socialization opportunities for older children than for younger, but these older girls all have had positive experiences. Second, the girls experienced a greater diversity of social interactions than do most children in institutional schools, especially inter-generational diversity. These children socialize with adults a lot. Their particular home education groups also contained a fairly broad range of socioeconomic statuses and religions (one of the girls mentioned that she would have never made friends with Muslim children in her old government school like she did in her home education group). Finally, the girls appreciated the freedom home education provided to allow them to choose socialization experiences they wanted. One girl mentioned wanting to join a trampolining group, which her mother was able to arrange for her. The mothers did note that there were sometimes challenges here as so many home education opportunities are geared to younger children, but they all made it work.
The authors conclude by acknowledging the limits of the study. It’s a convenience (the authors use the term “opportunistic”) sample of three females, all of whose mothers responded to a request via social media. The mothers captured this way “identified themselves as being highly involved in organising opportunities for their daughters and other home educating families.” (p. 512) Though they don’t quite say it, the method clearly seems to have attracted the most motivated, best sort of home educating mother. de Carvalho and Skipper also suggest that boys might have had different experiences.
Appraisal: As noted, this sampling methodology doesn’t really provide us with anything beyond three stories. They are interesting stories of successful socialization, especially for the two young ladies who had had bad experiences at school, but they don’t really tell us anything important about home education in the UK or anywhere else beyond the fact that three older females with very motivated mothers are thriving socially.
Milton Gaither, Messiah College