A Literature Review on the Development of the Family Education Guidance Service in China

Abstract

The Family Education Guidance Service is a public service developed by the government to give guidance and service to parents on educating their children in China. Recently, the service has attracted increasing attention from scholars, as well as from the Chinese Government. To assess the current status of research on the Family Education Guidance Service, this paper firstly introduces the policy history and clarifies the definition of the Family Education Guidance Service and other relevant terms used in China. It then presents a review of studies on the Family Education Guidance Service published in journals with high-grade ratings and analyzes the characteristics of current research in terms of year of publication, author affiliations, research themes, research methods, and target groups. Based on these, it makes suggestions for future development. Overall, 43 papers are reviewed, the findings of which reveal that related research is at the beginning of an upswing. Most authors belong to education colleges and law colleges of universities. The themes studied most often are the strategy exploration and legal construction of the Family Education Guidance Service. The parents of primary- and middle-school students are the most commonly studied group, followed by schoolteachers. The results indicate that despite the growing number of publications, research in this field is still in its early stages and many aspects require further exploration.