Parental Satisfaction with Early Childhood Education Services in Rural China: A National Survey

Abstract This study aims to explore parental satisfaction with early childhood education service in rural China. Altogether 13,131 Chinese parents who were randomly sampled from the 12 rural areas of China completed the Parent Satisfaction with Education Experiences Scale. The results indicated that: (1) Chinese parental satisfaction with the teacher contact experience had the highest mean scores, whereas their satisfaction with school contact experience had the lowest ones; (2) there were no significant urban-rural differences in parental satisfaction; (3) there were two latent classes of parental satisfaction: the Low Satisfaction Parents were the poor-educated low-class families in central China and were born in the 1990s; the High Satisfaction Parents were the 1970s cohort from the moderately-educated high-income families in eastern China; and (4) there was a significant difference in parental satisfaction between the Eastern, Central, and Western China. These findings have implied that more efforts should be made to promote equity, equality, and social justice in the field of early childhood education.