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amaica. It will also provide data which will inform educators and parents about parental involvement in schools and how it can be improved. This study will be significant to principals and the National Parents Teachers Association of Jamaica as they have raised concerns about low parental involvement in schools and the effect it has on both children and school. This study will give them additional information on how to improve parental involvement in inner-city schools. The findings will be significant as it can provide a foundation and add to available literature in Jamaica on parental involvement, and thus, prompting other researchers to conduct further studies.

Support for the innovation and methods of investigation

For the purpose of this research focus group will be used as a method of collecting information for parenting program improvement. According to Morgan (1993) focus group is defined as a method of group interviewing in which the interaction between the moderator and the group, as well as the interaction between group members, serves to seek information and insights in response to carefully designed questions. The nature of the questions and the group process produces an insight that is more outstanding in comparison to other information collection devises such as observation, surveys and less interactional interview techniques. Methods of recording and analyzing information gathered during focus groups, and strategies for collecting unbiased information have helped focus group research to gain credibility as an accurate and useful source of information collection. Focus group methods gained popularity in the 1980s when social scientists recognized the value of focus groups for qualitative research and adapted the techniques accordingly. In the 1990s focus group strategies have become widely researched and used in social sciences and human service organizations.

This innovation used is relevant as the problem of poor parental involvement is a social issue and since it concerns those that are involved, as they are the problem, it is best to get the suggestions from them seeing that if it is their suggestions they will own the process and find solutions.

In order to implement this innovation of focus group in my school setting, fifteen parents will be purposely selected base on their involvement and non-involvement in school base activities. The groups will consist of 7 and 8 participants who may have seen each other but do not know one another and who have similar associations to the topic being investigated (i.e., parents of a basic school discussing low involvement in school base activities). Although, focus groups often employ participants who are strangers to reduce sharing in ways that acquaintances might expect and to increase anonymity for the sake of honest responding, the participants selected are members of the same community and it is unavoidable for them not to see or know each other. Selecting participants who are similar may help in sharing ideas more freely and may prevent results from being so mixed that no conclusions may be drawn. It is important that the results are not generalized to other groups.

Two group sessions will be conducted, as using only one focus group to arrive at conclusions about a particular topic is risky since the opinions expressed may have more to do with the group dynamics (i.e., persuasive skills of one