Maximizing Sustainability: Conditions Impacting How Family Child Care Providers Engage in Quality Improvement Initiatives

• In Event: 1-215 - No One Right Way: Understanding Heterogeneity among Providers and Quality Improvement in Home-Based Child Care

Integrative Statement

Attention to the lives of the adults who care for children matters for very young children’s development (National Scientific Council on the Developing Child, 2004). The National Survey of Early Care and Education (NSECE) (NSECE Project Team, 2016) indicates that many more children are cared for in home-based settings than in child care centers and that such settings vary in important ways. Yet, home-based child care has historically been represented in research and developmental science in a categorical way: classifying settings by “type” and ignoring heterogeneity within each type The present study closely examined variations among licensed home-based care providers, or family child care homes, to understand how children’s experiences in such settings vary and to inform policies and programs aimed at impacting children’s experiences. Specifically, previous research from our lab indicated that providers varied in the active steps they took to engage in quality improvement initiatives. By better understanding the processes through which home-based care providers, including the subset of whom are committed to the work enough to become licensed, negotiate the stressors in their lives, we can identify ways to support the caregivers who care for many of the nation’s most vulnerable children.

Family child care providers (n = 84) in two regions of California from two different diverse, urban areas and one more rural area were observed and interviewed to create rich portraits (Lawrence-Lightfoot & Hoffman Davis, 1997) of providers’ daily routines, ideals of care, and the conditions that impact their professional development and learning. Data generated for each provider included: a field note from the visit, an interview transcript, the interviewer’s summary of the interview, photos of daily activities, and responses to a standardized survey. From these data, we are generating composite profiles of four providers to illustrate the main patterns found.

The analyses presented in this session will focus on three categories generated through constructivist grounded theory (Charmaz, 2014), with operational definitions for each category presented in Table 1: (1) the complexity of the family child care homes, (2) the maximizing sustainability, and (3) the provider’s engagement in quality improvement. Preliminary analyses indicate providers who were either low in complexity or higher in maximizing sustainability were more likely to engage in quality improvement, particularly when they demonstrated higher commitment to the work of caring for children.

These results suggest that programs seeking to improve the quality of care children receive in home settings may need to target providers who identify with child caring or help providers identify with and commit to the work, address the complexity of the settings in which providers work, and ensure that providers have sufficient strategies to enhance the sustainability of their practices.

Authors

• Holli Tonyan, CSUN
  Presenting Author

• Sarah Malecki, California State University, Northridge
  Non-Presenting Author

• Kirsten Marianne Reyna, California State University, Northridge
  Non-Presenting Author