The role of parents during adolescents’ process of making a choice for tertiary education

Abstract

At the end of secondary school nearly every adolescent makes a choice for tertiary education that balances their sense of who they are and who they want to become. To validate this choice, they perform three decisional tasks: orientation, exploration and commitment. Experiences within these tasks are structured by discussions with people from the adolescent’s personal social network, mainly their parents. Because previous research indicated a role for parents in an adolescent’s choice process, but did not describe this role on a detailed level, this study aims to investigate that role in an in-depth way. Through qualitative analysis of 11 cases, that describe a choice process from the adolescent’s and parents’ perspective, this study found that three types of choice processes can be distinguished: the knowing type, the finding type and the searching type. These types differ from each other in decisional status at the beginning and end of the choice process, the performed activities and the role parents take within the process. These valuable findings can be used to give parents, from adolescents that have to make their choice for tertiary education in the future, some extra information about the performance of activities within the choice process. Besides that, this study provides insights in meaningful questions that parents can ask to help adolescents in structuring their experiences in the previous mentioned activities.