Alright...ARE YOU ALL READY? OK...HERE WE GO!!!
In my glorious, yet exhausting search for research surrounding the issue of socialization in the homeschool vs. non-homeschool debate, just as I was about to impale myself on my favorite samuri sword, I stumbled upon an idea: what if I started a search by typing in the names of the researchers of some of the studies I couldn't access? Might that lead me somewhere? True, not necessarily a novel idea, but one I had overlooked simply because of the futility of accessing the studies at the source site.
OK, first to start with the reason why finding unbiased or governmental research is so difficult. Homeschool organizations do not want to participate in these kind of studies. As I quoted from the HSDLA website, in a previous post:
It is HSLDA's firm belief that federal government spending on education is unconstitutional and must be eliminated. While we support the position that the federal government should not be involved in education at any level, we also support measures that incrementally reduce the control of the federal government over education.
This quote seems to permeate much of the homeschool community, or at least much of the homeschool community that makes their presence known. Some further information around this:
From the National Center for Education Statistic (Yes,
the United States Department of Education!):
However, measuring the prevalence of home schooling in the United States has proven to be a difficult task. Estimates of the number of children who are home schooled vary by hundreds of thousands of children. In the last decade, there have been several attempts to determine the
number of children who are home schooled. Some studies have attempted to assess the size of the home-schooled population by identifying and surveying home-schooling families and extrapolating
from those surveys estimates of the number of children who are schooled at home. Other researchers have collected data from state administrative records to develop estimates. All of these estimates, over time, have ranged from 200,000 children in 1988 (Kohn 1988) to 1.15 million children in 1995 (Ray 1997). However, most of these researchers recognize that their estimates of the number of home-schooled children include unknown sources of error (Kohn 1988; Lines 1991, 1996, 1998; Ray 1997).
Also from the same source:
The low household response rate in the NHES allows for the possibility that homeschooling families, who may not wish to be identified
or involved in government-related research (Kaseman and Kaseman 1991), may have participated at a lower rate than other families.
There is much more to this source. Here is the link.
http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2000/2000311.pdf
Interestingly, there were several other abstract quoted sites on a couple of reserach clearinghouse webpages that also directed one to links that gave similar information. However, as these clearinghouses were homeschool sponsored, many of these links didn't work. Far be it, however, for a tenacious researcher as myself, to give up so easily. Further explorations located this absolutely
wonderful article writen by two very strong proponents of homeschooling.
Home Education Magazine: One of the oldest and most informative homeschooling magazines.
There are so many quotes that I could take from this article, that I could use several posts to do it. In brief, the Kasemans' position is similar to the
HSDLA's. They seem completely suspicious of govenmental research and express concerns about how it will lead to regulation of homeschooling, making it comprable to conventional schooling. The Kasemans', in another article, go on to criticize an important HSDLA study,
supporting homeschooling, as being invalid.
The HSDLA endorsed study is here:
EPAA Vol. 7 No. 8 Rudner: Home School Students, 1998
The Kasemans' response is here:
HSLDA STUDY ON HOMESCHOOLING
Here, the Kasemans do a great job of showing flaws in the HSDLA study, by demostrating an umrepresentative population, administration problems with accepting and including responses (only 48% of responses were actually counted), and other problems with the report as a whole.
There seems to be a general agenda though: keep government out of homeschooling, and by preventing research, this goal is more easily attained.
One more point around research validity in homeschool studies. Most 'in house' research seems to be sponsored by Christian groups, as these organizations dominated the homeschool community. The HSLDA is Christian based, as is NHERI and NCHE. These (and the people associated with them) are the big players in homeschooling. The following aritcle does a good job outlining this and, again, indicating the general invalidity of research and the position the homeschool research is not helpful, in general.
PJE_Article response
To me, what this all shows is the difficulty of finding any valid research on the topic. And, when you check the links I have cited, so far,
all except for the US government link are homeschooled or homeschooled sponsored websites, adding, hopefully, to the credibility of my research.
Continued...