Relationship between Permissive Parenting Style and Examination Cheating Tendencies among Kenya Secondary School Students

Abstract

The study investigated the relationship between permissive parenting styles and examination cheating tendencies among secondary school students in Siaya Sub County, Kenya. Diana Baumrind’s parenting styles theory and Ajzen’s theory of Planned Behaviour provided a theoretical framework for the study while adopting a Correlational study design within a mixed methods approach. The target population was 1,908 form three students, 35 Teacher Counselors and 35 Deputy Principals. A sample size of 190 Form Three students, which was 10% of the population of students, was used after stratified random sampling. In addition, 8 Teacher Counselors and 8 Deputy Principals purposively sampled formed part of the participants. Parenting style and Involvement in Examination Cheating Tendency Questionnaires were used to collect quantitative data from form three students while interview schedule was used to collect qualitative data from the Teacher Counselors and Deputy Principals. Validity was ascertained by expert judgment of two university lecturers while reliability of the instrument was ensured using Cronchbar reliability test, where an index of 0.77413 was obtained. Quantitative data was analyzed using descriptive statistics as well as inferential statistics such as Pearson Correlation, aided by SPSS version 22, while qualitative data was analyzed through thematic framework. The findings revealed that permissive parenting has a strong positive influence on examination cheating tendencies with r=0.641 p<0.05. The study recommended that Kenyan Teachers’ Service Commission should train more teacher counselors in schools to cope with the large number of students who have varied parental backgrounds.