Early Childhood Topics

• Head Start/Early Head Start
• Early Care & Education Settings
• Home Visiting
• Early Childhood Education Practices
• Studying Children in a Multicultural Society
• Clients

Measurement Development: Quality of Caregiver-Child Interactions

Although there are several measures in use to capture the global quality of an early childhood setting, there are few that focus specifically on child-adult interactions, especially in the earliest months of life. Through a study funded by the Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation at the Administration for Children and Families, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Mathematica is developing a new measure to assess the quality of caregiver‐child interactions for infants and toddlers in nonparental care. The measure will be appropriate for use across child care settings, including center‐based and family child care settings, as well as single- and mixed-age classrooms.

This project, called the Quality of Caregiver-Child Interactions for Infants and Toddlers (Q-CCIIT) project, includes a technical work group of national experts with in-depth knowledge of research, policy, and practice related to infant and toddler development and care environments. In addition, a literature review is providing a summary of the extant measures of quality appropriate for use in nonparental care environments that serve infants and toddlers and evaluating the degree to which these measures provide adequate measurement of quality features. Drawing on recommendations from the literature review, a measurement framework is being constructed and tested during a pilot study. The psychometric field test, to be conducted in 2012, will involve observations with more than 400 providers, with repeat visits to a subset of providers to establish test-retest reliability. To assess convergent validity, a second observation using a validation measure with a subset of providers will be conducted. Child assessment data from parents will be collected concurrent with observational data and at a six-month followup. Finally, a detailed sustainability plan will be developed to ensure that the early childhood education field and potential users know about the measure and what is required to administer it as well as provide support for widespread and appropriate use.

Subcontractors include Child Trends, assisting with the literature review; FPG Child Development Institute, University of North Carolina, assisting with measure development and analysis tasks; and WestEd, assisting with the sustainability plan.