Family Day Care Rating Scale

Section: Observed Program Qualitymentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Family income, parent education, and perceived constraints as predictors of observed program quality and parent rated program quality

Torquati

Raikes

Huddleston-Casas

et al. 2011

“…We employed two of the most commonly-used indices of child care quality in existing research: global quality, which measures multiple aspects of quality within a child care home (the Family Day Care Rating Scale; Harms & Clifford, 1989), and caregiver sensitivity, which measures the attentiveness and responsiveness of caregivers (Caregiver Interaction Scale; Arnett, 1989), because global quality and sensitivity may reflect different aspects of provider environments. Accordingly, we explored the possibility that these two measures of quality are differentially affected by policy variables and provider characteristics.…”

Section: Research Questionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Global quality was the total score for each provider from observations obtained from the Family Day Care Rating Scale (FDCRS; Harms & Clifford, 1989) and following scoring procedures recommended by the authors. Observations were conducted over a 2-h time period during the morning of a typical day and captured multiple aspects of the family child care home (subscales include space and furnishings for care and learning, basic care, language and reasoning, learning activities, social development, adult needs, and provisions for exceptional children).…”

Section: Global Child Care Qualitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Regulation, subsidy receipt and provider characteristics: What predicts quality in child care homes?

Raikes¹,

Raikes

Wilcox³

2005

Far less is known about predictors of quality for family child care homes than for child care centers. The current study of 120 randomly-selected family child care providers in four Midwestern states examined distal, state policy-level variables (family child care regulations and the concentration of children cared for who received public child care subsidies, referred to as subsidy density), and proximal, provider-level variables (providers' level of education and reported annual training hours) as influences on global quality and caregiver sensitivity. More regulation, lower subsidy density, higher levels of provider education and more training hours were associated with higher global quality in family child care homes. Lower subsidy density and higher provider education were associated with more sensitive caregiving, but no effects on sensitivity were observed for regulation and training hours. An interaction effect indicated that regulation moderated the relation between education and sensitivity; education was especially important for sensitive caregiving among providers low in regulation. In addition, after including all predictor variables in the model, significant mean differences between states were noted. Findings demonstrate that both policy-level variables and provider characteristics influence quality in family child care homes, and further, that they may interact to affect observed child care quality. Implications for state child care policies are discussed with emphasis on implications for quality of care for low-income children whose tuition is paid by public child care subsidies.

“…In the few studies that have collected observational data across types, the categories and instruments used are often different for centers and family child care home settings-an indication that the structural differences are great enough to require different categories to assess process. For example, the most common observational instrument, the Early Childhood Environment Rating Scale (ECERS-R; Harms, Clifford, & Cryer, 1998), is used in centers; its companion instrument for home settings, the Family Day Care Rating Scale (FDCRS; Harms & Clifford, 1989), has only partial overlap with the center version. The subscales from the Early Childhood Environment Rating Scale-Revised (ECERS-R) can be used to create one dimension of quality in centers (Perlman, Zellman, & Le, 2004), and there is a strong relation between observed quality and structural quality (Burchinal, Cryer, Clifford, & Howes, 2002;Phillips, Mekos, Scarr, McCartney, & Abbott-Shim, 2000).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Structural and process features in three types of child care for children from high and low income families

Dowsett

Huston

Imes

et al. 2008

223

122

We use observations from the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (SECCYD) to compare structural and process characteristics of child care centers, family child care homes (nonrelative care in a home setting) and care by relatives for 2, 3-and 4 ½-year-old children. Type of care differences in structural and caregiver characteristics were consistent across ages: centers had higher child-to-adult ratios and bigger groups; centers had caregivers with better education, more training in early childhood, and less traditional beliefs about child rearing. Children in centers experienced more cognitive stimulation, less frequent language interactions with adults, less frequent negative interactions with adults, and less television viewing than did those in other types of care. In centers and family child care homes compared to relative settings, children engaged in more positive and negative interactions with peers and spent more time in transition and unoccupied. Curvilinear associations were found between structural features of care and family income, particularly for caregiver education and training. In contrast, process measures of caregiving rose monotonically with family income. Children from high-income families experienced more sensitive care, more cognitive stimulation, and fewer negative interactions with adults than did those from low-income families. We interpret the findings by linking the structural features and caregiver training to the cognitive and social processes observed in different types of care. Future research designed to understand the influences of child care on children's behavior might benefit from using this more nuanced description of child care experiences.Child care quality is a well-documented predictor of children's intellectual and social development, but recent evidence indicates that type of care may be important independently of "global" ratings of quality. A recurrent finding in the literature is that children who participate in center-based arrangements-including Head Start-during their infant and preschool years perform better on cognitive and language development and show better preacademic skills than children who spend an equivalent amount of time in child care homes or relative care of comparable quality (Garces, Thomas, & Currie, 2002; NICHD Early Child Care Research Network [ECCRN], 2000a; NICHD ECCRN & Duncan, 2003).The relations of type of care to children's social behavior are more uncertain. Two longitudinal studies of large, national samples have shown that children with more center care experience were rated by caregivers and elementary school teachers as having more behavior problems and less self control than those who had not experienced center care (Magnuson, Ruhm, & Waldfogel, 2007; NICHD 2002;2003a). Most longitudinal investigations of children from Contact author Chantelle Dowsett, Human Development & Family Sciences, University of Texas at Austin, 1 University Station/A2700, Austin, TX 78712; 512-471-3141; E-mail: dowsettcj@mail.utexa...