Mapping the Landscape of Parental Involvement in Education: A Bibliometric Review via CiteSpace

Abstract

Parental involvement plays a crucial role in shaping children’s academic achievement and literacy development, thereby affecting the achievement of educational goals in basic education. The aim of this review was to conduct a bibliometric analysis of articles on parental involvement published over the past decade in order to identify hotspots, citation networks, co-occurring concepts, emerging trends, and potential areas for future research.
1,523 articles were extracted from the Web of Science core collection using PRISMA and analysed using the visualisation software CiteSpace. This review employed network science methodologies, including co-citation and co-occurrence network analyses to identify research trends, hotspots and landscape in parental involvement studies over the past decade
The result of the review underscores the significance of parental involvement in education, highlighting its role in boosting academic achievement, fostering home-school collaboration, and supporting children’s cognitive, emotional, and social development. The evolving field of parental involvement research is marked by interdisciplinary integration, technological application, multicultural considerations, and a focus on long-term developmental impacts, reflecting a dynamic and expanding research area aimed at enhancing educational strategies and child development outcomes.
The contribution of this review is in the use of the visualisation tool CiteSpace to conduct a bibliometric analysis using different metrics, focusing on the temporal and dynamic developments specifically in the field of parental involvement in children’s education in the last decade. The findings highlight the vital role of parental involvement in boosting student success, enhancing home-school collaboration, and supporting children's development. This review primarily relies on co-occurrence and co-citation analysis using CiteSpace, and thus fails to deeply explore the theoretical contributions and contextual findings from qualitative literature in parental involvement research. Future studies could incorporate systematic reviews or meta-analyses to address this limitation. Given that the parental involvement in research fields is increasingly emphasizing interdisciplinary integration, technological empowerment, and long-term effect assessment, future education policymakers should incorporate home-school partnership into the systematic framework of educational governance. By establishing a parent education training system and a mechanism for integrating community resources, they can promote the transformation of parental involvement from "periodic activities" to "continuous and institutionalized practices", thereby helping to achieve the goals of educational equity and sustainability.