Conference Program

The relationship between schools and families is now recognized as a crucial aspect of educational processes, both for its effects on student learning and well-being and for its role in building more inclusive and cooperative school environments (Epstein, 2001; Stefanski, Valli, & Jacobson, 2016). The literature has long shown that family involvement can be a resource for academic success and the quality of the educational experience, but it has also highlighted that this relationship is never neutral or linear. School-family relationships are in fact marked by ambivalence, divergent expectations, role asymmetries, interpretative conflicts over educational responsibilities, and tensions related to communication, mutual trust, and professional recognition (Hornby & Lafaele, 2011; Epstein, 2018). From this perspective, the partnership between schools and families appears less as a given and more as an unstable balance, continuously negotiated in everyday practices.
Starting from this framework, the contribution takes teachers' attitudes towards their relationship with families as a way for analyzing the quality, tensions, and meanings attributed to this relationship. The underlying hypothesis is that these attitudes reflect not only individual orientations but also organizational conditions, professional cultures, and differentiated social positions.
The analysis of this study is based on a sample of 4,822 teachers surveyed as part of the fourth Survey on the living and working conditions of Italian teachers, who were asked to complete a 15-item Likert scale questionnaire on their attitudes towards their relationship with families. The items were subjected to PCA with varimax rotation, which revealed three main components: a first component of criticality in the school-family relationship, marked by relational difficulties, mistrust, and a perception of parental invasiveness; a second component of shared educational responsibility, which expresses openness to collaboration between teachers, families, and the wider educational community; a third component of delimitation of the teaching role, which refers to a more limited conception of the boundaries of the relationship with families and the educational mandate of the school.
Starting from these three components, the analysis is divided into two successive steps. First, the paper analyzes the main socio-demographic and professional determinants of teachers' attitudes towards the relationship with families, considering characteristics such as gender, age, length of service, school type, subject area, and working environment. Second, it explores the association between these attitudinal components and certain dimensions of work well-being, with a particular focus on stress, burnout, and professional self-efficacy. The first expected contribution is to provide an empirical mapping of teachers' attitudes toward their relationships with families. Second, it seeks to demonstrate the association between these attitudes and various work conditions, well-being, and professional sustainability.