A Study of Home-School Communication and Mutual Trust in Tanzanian Secondary Schools from the Perspective of Social Capital Theories

Abstract

Communication serves as a vital component of home-school partnership. It is embedded in the home-school engagement rather than a standalone construct. Communication does not only promote positive home-school relationships but also stimulates and strengthens other partnership components such as trust. Nonetheless, studies have overlooked this variable for years. As compared to trust that has received prominent attention in the body of knowledge, the majority of the studies found that improving communication is the major way of fostering trust. Surprisingly, it is not clear how and what components of communication promote trust. This thesis extends the literature by examining communication aspects that affect home-school trust. Adopting the pragmatic paradigm, this work employed a concurrent mixed-methods design, involving qualitative and quantitative techniques tools to gather data from 340 parents and 145 teachers from 10 schools selected via a stratified random sampling technique. While the quantitative survey was distributed to all participants, the in-depth interviews were conducted to seven school administrators. Moreover, there were four and five focus groups for teachers and parents respectively. The analytical framework considered the components of the social capital theory that integrated different scholarly ideas. Using the three major dimensions of the integrated framework, bonding, bridging, and linking social capital served as the lenses toward the interpretation and discussion of the findings.