“That’s the only place where you can get this information today!”. An exploratory study on Parenting WhatsApp Groups with a sample of Italian parents

Abstract

This paper studies Parenting WhatsApp Groups (PWGs) as interactional loci parents can join to be involved in their children’s academic life, building on the quantitative and qualitative results of an online survey administered to a sample of Italian parents. First, PWGs are positioned within the broader literature on offline/online parent involvement, parents’ peer interaction via social media, and technological peculiarities of WhatsApp. Second, quantitative results from a binary logistic regression are reported to explore possible predictors of PWG’s membership among our sample, as well as quantitative and qualitative findings investigating parents’ perceptions/opinions of and experience with PWGs. Finally, limitations, future directions, and implications of this study are discussed.