Poster #46 - What is a Child Care Desert? A Systematic Review of Definitions and Data Sources

• In Event: Poster Session 16

Abstract

While funds to address the lack of affordable and reliable child care were included in the American Rescue Plan and the American Jobs Plan (CLASP, 2021; White House, 2021, para. 53), funds were eliminated from the Build Back Better Act and the Inflation Adjustment Act (Hickey, 2022). Given the benefits of early childhood education to young children (Phillips et al., 2017; Yoshikawa et al., 2013) and working parents (Schochet, 2019; U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation, 2020), it is vital that investments are made to increase the number of spaces for children in early child care and education centers. But how do we know where these slots should be and how many are needed?
There is a growing body of research on ‘child care deserts’ (e.g., Davis et al., 2019; Malik et al., 2018) that seeks to understand where there are gaps in the availability of child care. While this research demonstrates that there is a need for additional slots, the methods used to determine where these deserts are located vary. For example, demand can be defined as broadly as all children under 6 years old (Kim & Wang, 2019) or as narrow as the number of 4-year-olds whose families are below 75% of the state median income (Barnett, 2018). The goal of the current study is to surface the varying definitions, metrics, and data sources that are used by researchers in child care desert studies, compare and contrast those decisions, and discuss the impacts that the choices have on the prevalence of child care deserts.
A systematic review of this literature was conducted. The authors created a list of search terms, parameters, databases, and inclusion/exclusion criteria that were used (see Table 1). Once the review plan was developed, a study pre-registration was filed through the OpenScienceFramework portal (First Two Authors, 2021). Subsequently, all relevant literature was pulled and screened in accordance with the pre-registration plan. Currently, the final sample of articles from the initial search are being coded and analyzed. The taxonomy of review includes but is not limited to: publication date, publication type, publication’s purpose, jurisdiction, geography, age group, method for operationalizing and measuring need, source and evidence of quality of need information, method for operationalizing and measuring supply, source and evidence of quality of supply information, indication of the quality of the program, and the definition of a ‘desert’. Figure 1 shows how the research team arrived at the final sample of articles.
Preliminary findings suggest that studies use a variety of definitions and methods to determine where child care deserts exist and the field has not yet come to a consensus on how to best conceptualize, measure, and define important components of this research. With the societal and political interest towards universal prekindergarten, it is important that those providing the evidence of the supply and demand for the slots think carefully about their definitions and the information source. The authors hope that their review will help researchers, policymakers, and practitioners think more critically when considering these issues.

Authors

• Caroline DeWitt, University of Pennsylvania
  Presenting Author

• Kristen Coe

• John W. Fantuzzo, University of Pennsylvania