Parents Choosing Access To Secondary Education For Their Kids

With the development of society, the improvement of family economy and the increasing of educational opportunities, it’s more available and more convenient for individuals accessing to better education. As one of the important educational stage in the post-secondary education, high school education is drawing more and more people’s attention. However, the competition for high school education is increasingly fierce at the same time. For parents engaged in different kind of jobs, what kinds of choice did they make when they were choosing high school for their children, what kinds of motivation did they made, what were the differences between those motivations? Did they comply with the same logical thought? The paper which based on the DJ town in western Anhui province, using the quantitative research and qualitative research combined with W. Schultz’s human capital theory and Bourdieu’s " Capital-Field-Habitus " theory as the research perspective and analysis framework, is trying to explore the motivation that made by parents engaged in different jobs.The study is divided into five parts. The first chapter is the introduction. After reviewing the literature survey on educational opportunities at home and abroad, it came to the assumption in the first chapter. The second chapter explains the research methods. Grasping the different occupational groups’ selecting process and strategies in the whole is needed when studying the groups’selecting action. And then it came to exploring the psychological processes and motivations. Therefore, this paper chose quantitative research (questionnaire survey) and qualitative (semi-structured interviews) as the research method. The third chapter focuses on the socio-economic, educational conditions, as well as residents’ occupations in the DJ town, this is the basic preparation for the study. In the latter part of this chapter, it tried to analyze factors that influence people’s choices. Chapter four is about making qualitative analysis for different groups’selections, and the motivations according to the characteristics of different occupations. The fifth chapter makes a summary and responds to the assumptions mentioned in the introduction part, and pointed out the problems that need further exploring.