ABSTRACT
This chapter presents general conceptual and statistical frameworks for examining family environments and their associations with children's behaviours, followed by a review of some of the seminal family environment studies from education-related research. In social-psychological and educational empirical research, children's behaviour has typically been examined in relation to one of the following three models: the trait model, the situationism position, and the interactionism framework. The chapter reviews set of family environment studies that have adopted various conceptual and methodological frameworks of analysis. Much of family environment research has relied on the use of restricted statistical techniques such as product-moment correlations which reveal only bivariate relations, and analysis of variance techniques that require the grouping of variables into levels. Regression models have been used, which concentrate on determining how much variance in children's behaviour is related to the addition of family measures to the equations.
