Navigating Parental Incarceration and Higher Education: Narratives of Undergraduate Experiences While Dealing with Parental Incarceration

This qualitative narrative study examined how parental incarceration affects young adults’ college experience. The study allowed individuals to share their stories and narrate their undergraduate experiences while their parent(s) were incarcerated. This study interviewed eight individuals who had a parent incarcerated during their undergraduate experience using a narrative inquiry methodology (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000) with Trauma-Informed Resilience and Posttraumatic Growth theoretical frameworks (Steele & Kuban, 2011) to gain insight into their perceived college experience and factors for their college access, success, and degree completion. The findings revealed various themes in regard to the participants’ experiences shaped by parental incarceration (emotional impacts, motivations, financial impacts, and limited parental involvement in academic life) and the factors they found important to their college success (external support systems, personal resilience, determination, and flexibility in educational paths). The study also highlighted advice from the participants to future college students experiencing parental incarceration and recommendations for the community and educational institutions to be able to better serve this population of students, such as shifting views, lifting voices, developing allies, having target outreach and support, and developing more trauma-informed pedagogy and more flexible educational paths.