| Sumario: | We examine potential gender and class-level differences in two forms of student-parent contact among undergraduates: parental academic involvement and student-to-parent communication. Work by Tannen (2014) indicates that women undergraduates should be more likely to contact their parents throughout college as a means of maintaining intimacy and connection. In return, parents should be more involved with their undergraduate daughters as compared to their sons as a means of reproducing power and hierarchy. For both men and women, parental contact is expected to decrease over time. Using data from a sample of undergraduates, we found that undergraduate women did experience higher levels of involvement in their academic lives from parents than men, but only during the first two academic years. As well, there was a difference in student-initiated communication with parents, with women contacting their parents more frequently than men. In regression models, although class level was not a significant predictor, we did find a significant and negative relationship between student-parent contact outcomes and student age. Gender was also a consistent predictor. Thus, there appears to be some evidence for the predictions of sociolinguistic theory with regard to student-parent contact during the college years.
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