Child Care

How Is Child Care Quality Measured 2

Last Updated Nov 18, 2008 06:54 PM

Other measures have been less successful in providing reliable and valid assessments of process quality. For example, Lamb and colleagues failed to find concurrent associations between child care quality and child functioning in their study of child care in Sweden (Broberg, Hwang, Lamb, and Bookstein, 1990). One factor that likely contributed to the lack of significant relations was problems with their quality measure. The Belsky-Walker Checklist (Broberg et al., 1990) asks observers to check off if 13 positive events (e.g., caregiver provided verbal elaboration, caregiver gives heightened emotional display; signs of positive regard ) and 7 negative events (e.g., child cries; child aimless; caregivers in non-child conversations) occur at least once during 3-minute observation intervals. This 3-minute time observation frame was substantially longer than the 10- to 30-second intervals recommended for recording social interactions (Yarrow and Zahn-Waxler, 1979). Consequently, the checklist may have failed to detect meaningful distinctions in caregiver behavior because the time interval was too long to detect meaningful differences. This checklist underscores the challenge of designing and assessing process quality. Detecting relations between process quality and child outcomes requires robust measures.

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