Thomas Babalis

Parental involvement in secondary education schools: the views of parents in Greece

The present study explores Greek parents’ views on parental educational involvement and its impact on adolescent scholastic and social development. Specifically, aspects of parental involvement such as the achieved objectives of current parent–school communication, the psychological climate dominating teacher–parent interactions and parents’ suggestions for improvement of current policies and practices are examined. Four hundred and seventy‐five parents participated in the study. Findings showed that family–school communication is believed to be insufficient in Greece, despite the fact that parents tend to: (1) regard their cooperation with teachers as determinative of adolescent academic and psychosocial development; (2) consider teachers to be friendly and caring; and (3) believe that secondary school provides some opportunities for constructive parental involvement. These paradoxes are discussed and explained as a result of radical changes in current social and educational values, principles and objectives.

Stochastic vectors in modelling risk control operations for supporting intelligent behaviour of information systems

Random contractions constitute a kind of stochastic multiplicative models with particular theoretical and practical interest. Random sums are also recognised as important stochastic models with very useful applications in a wide variety of theoretical and practical disciplines. The paper concentrates on the formulation of a random vector based on two random sums of random contractions and the establishment of sufficient conditions for evaluating the corresponding characteristic function. Moreover, the paper establishes interesting interpretations of the formulated random vector in some fundamental areas of informatics.