ABSTRACT
The focus of my work has primarily been on the origins of violence in close relationships, particularly in parent-child relationships, not on how schools and families relate to one another. The framework in which this work has been done, however, has, I believe, tremendous relevance for understanding the origins of negative transactions between parents and teachers. This framework emphasizes the role of expectations, interpretations, and attributions of causality in producing conflict in interpersonal relationships (Azar 1986, 1989). These internal processes may play a similar role in determining the quality of transactions between schools and families. In this chapter, it will be argued that teachers may make interpretations regarding the meaning of parental behaviour that are based in a different social reality than that in which many families live. Parents, in turn, may come to their transactions with schools with a set of assumptions based in their own negative academic experiences and in erroneous or negatively biased beliefs about schools and teachers. Both situations can lead to conflict.
