Constructing and refining a model of antecedent mechanisms of parental educational anxiety in the context of General and Vocational Segregation: A mixed study based on an exploratory sequential design

General and vocational education segregation at the high school level has long been a hot topic in China's education system. To contribute to addressing parental educational anxiety in such a context by enhancing its causal mechanism model, this study utilized an exploratory time-series research design and a mixed research method. Initially, in-depth interviews were conducted, followed by coding analysis. They revealed that parents' educational anxiety is characterized by "insufficient information and elevated anxiety", and its main factors were identified as the parents' level of policy understanding, environmental modeling, family support, and perception of educational fairness. A questionnaire was then created to investigate educational anxiety as a variable, and the results were analyzed using fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis to conduct a configurational analysis. Parental educational anxiety was categorized into three fundamental modes: the policy-information-driven mode, the information-consumption-driven mode, and the subject-information-driven mode. The results of the analysis indicate that the level of parents' understanding of educational policies influences their educational anxiety level, their orientation on media communication affects their recognition of the educational ecology, and their image of vocational education exacerbates their internal anxiety.