What is Quality Care and How Can We Provide It?: Listening to Virginia Home-based Providers

• In Event: Learning With Home-Based Child Care Providers and Parents Through Participatory Research Approaches

Abstract

Introduction
COVID-19 revealed the essential role of early care providers. There are 600,000 children in Virginia under age six, the majority in child care, most of which is in someone else’s home rather than in centers (Childcare Aware, 2020). Fewer than 1% of family-based providers nationwide are accredited, none of which are within the top tier of the Quality Rating and Improvement System (Childcare Aware, 2020). Home child care providers are disproportionately poorly paid women of color and immigrants. Their voices are largely absent from the literature and policy forums (Shdaimah, Palley & Miller, 2018).

Research Question:
How do home-based providers understand quality care and endeavor to provide it to the children and families they serve?

Study population
Data were collected from 53 home-based child care providers in Virginia using virtual focus groups, with a second wave of data collection planned. Virginia is a national model for early childhood education innovation and therefore research in VA can be used to inform national policy. Home-based providers are uniquely positioned to explain the competing demands of accessibility, affordability, and quality of childcare (Schulte & Durana, 2016). Their intimate engagement with children and families in their care also provide valuable insights in the communities they serve, which include families for whom center-based care is not feasible, such as parents who work nontraditional hours (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2021).

Methods
Participatory action research creates opportunities by sharing power in all aspects of the research with those who are most affected by the policies we study but often ignored (Jordan & Kapoor, 2016). This qualitative participatory action research study included researchers, representation from the Virginia Department of Education, and home-based providers all of whom were part of a community advisory board. The board informed all aspects of the design of the study, the implementation, and will influence the dissemination of the results. The community advisory board(CAB) operates through discussion and consensus, and members are compensated for their time.

Results
Initial findings confirm tensions among the care challenges (accessibility, affordability, and quality), such that quality improvements may be limited by cost to providers and to the families they serve (thereby impacting accessibility). Providers were firmly committed to families, noting that they operated on subsistence margins often on the verge of having to shutter their doors. Pandemic financial relief and assistance from VDOE and provider networks were crucial in enabling many to stay open when there were gaps in income, particularly for those with staff who experienced financial precarity.

Discussion
In this panel, we discuss insights gained from engaging with providers. We describe processes and challenges working with the community advisory board, including the diverse interests of stakeholders, skepticism about the value of research in general, and logistical and technical hurdles such as time commitments, facility with communication, and limitations placed by university requirements (such as ethics training for all team members). We also discuss how recruitment and findings were impacted by the participatory methods and how these have shaped our study moving forward.

Authors

• Corey Shdaimah, University of Maryland Baltimore

• Elizabeth Palley, Adelphi University
  Presenting Author

• Bweikia Steen, Mason