A personal construct approach to understanding parents’ views of Sure Start Children’s Centre Services

A systematic literature review investigated parents' views regarding the facilitators and barriers to parental participation in the Early Intervention Services Sure Start Children's Centres, Head Start and Early Head Start.

Engaging parents is an ongoing aim of these services and a principle of Sure Start is listening to parents' views (Eisenstadt, 2002).

The review identified 12 studies that met the inclusion and exclusion criteria. These were appraised and the main findings were compiled.

A range of factors that could act as either facilitators or barriers to participation were identified, with the most prominent themes relating to relationships and emotional factors, service related factors and benefits received by parents.

The existing research in this area is critiqued in terms of methodological difficulties and a lack of a grounding in theory or psychology.

The current study therefore investigated parents' views of Sure Start Children's Centres using Personal Construct Psychololgy (Kelly, 1955/1991).

The study aimed to understand the constructs parents have regarding Children's Centre Services, how they value the services they had accessed, whether parents view services in a similar way, and how the provision can be improved and developed.

Ten participants took part in the study.

In Stage One, Personal constructs related to Children's Centre Services were elicited and these were grouped into nine super-ordinate categories.

In Stage Two participants completed repertory grids with the purpose of evaluating their experiences against the nine construct categories.

Statistical analysis of these included Principal Component Analysis and Generalised Proscrutres to investigate the extent to which parents viewed services in a similar way.

In the final part of the study, Stage Three, four of the initial participants were interviewed to investigate how Children's Centres should improve their service delivery, and a thematic framework was generated (Ritchie & Spencer, 2001).