A comparison of social adjustment between home and traditionally schooled students

140 (70 home-schooled, 70 traditionally schooled), ages 8-10, equally split by sex

US children aged 8-10, matched pairs drawn from home-schooling and public/private school populations

The only study in the socialisation literature whose primary outcome is scored by blind trained observers rather than by a parent, a teacher or the child. Matched pairs on race, sex, age, family size, socioeconomic status and — importantly — the number and frequency of out-of-school activities, which forecloses the obvious rebuttal that homeschoolers simply do more organised activities. Children were video-recorded in mixed groups during free play and a cooperative puzzle task; graduate students and counselling professionals blind to schooling status scored the Direct Observation Form of the Child Behavior Checklist (96 problem-behaviour items plus on-task behaviour). Two secondary measures were self-report: the Piers-Harris Children's Self-Concept Scale and the Children's Assertive Behavior Scale. Still grade D: an unpublished doctoral dissertation later summarised in Home School Researcher, matched-pairs rather than randomised, matching on observable characteristics only, a single session per child, n = 140, and the recruitment route for the home-schooled sample (support-group volunteers) is the standard selection problem. The DOF also scores behaviour in a novel mixed-group setting, which is not the setting either group normally occupies.

The observed-behaviour result and the self-report results point in different directions, which is the useful part. On blind observer ratings, home-schooled children showed significantly fewer problem behaviours (p < .05); their scores sat inside the normal range while the traditionally schooled children's were reported as well above it, a gap later summarised as roughly eight-fold. Shyers described the conventionally schooled children as aggressive, loud and competitive and the home-schooled children as introducing themselves, initiating conversation, taking turns and inviting uninvolved children into play. On the two self-report measures there was NO significant difference: self-concept was above the national average for both groups, and assertiveness was slightly passive for both. Read carefully, this is not evidence that home education builds social skill — a lower count of disruptive behaviours in a play session is at least as consistent with compliance, adult-oriented conduct or unfamiliarity with peer group norms as with superior social competence, and the null on assertiveness is the datum most compatible with the isolation worry. It is, however, the strongest available evidence against the strong form of the concern: children with a serious social deficit do not usually look better than controls to blind raters.

High. Matching on SES, family size and activity frequency removes some of the grossest confounding but nothing about parental personality, religiosity, warmth or the child's heritable temperament. Home-schooling parents choosing an unusual arrangement are an unusual sample of parents, and behaviour in a puzzle task is exactly the kind of outcome their children would be expected to differ on regardless of where lessons happen.

Never replicated in thirty-plus years, despite being the most-cited empirical claim in the pro-homeschooling socialisation literature and the only observer-blind design in it. That absence is itself the finding: a result this load-bearing and this cheap to repeat has not been repeated, and the field has instead accumulated more parent-report surveys. Treat the eight-fold figure as a single unreplicated dissertation result, not as an established quantity.