Facts In Action

Research has well established the importance of quality in early care and education settings. Measuring quality, however, can be challenging. A number of tools exist to assess quality in family child care settings including: the Family Day Care Rating Scale (FDCRS), and the Intant/Toddler Environment Rating Scale (ITERS). However, these instruments have limitations. Some require intensive training and a fairly long time to administer. Others assess the general quality of care available in a setting, but not the quality of care being received by an individual child. Researchers have developed a new instrument to address some of these limitations.

The Child Care HOME Inventories — the Infant Toddler version for children under 3, and the Early Childhood version for children 3 and over — were developed as a simple but reliable alternative instrument for measuring quality in Family Child Care homes. The Inventories take less time, about one hour, in contrast to the four to eight hours needed to administer others, and require about 90 minutes of training for the observer as opposed to 4 to 8 hours. They were found to be non-intrusive and easy for caregivers to tolerate.

The CC-HOME Inventories are designed to focus on the quality of experience of a particular child, rather than an average level of care for all children. The Infant Toddler version contains 43 criteria organized into six subscales: Caregiver Responsivity, Acceptance, Organization, Learning Materials, Caregiver Involvement, and Variety of Stimulation. The Early Childhood version contains 58 items organized into eight subscales: Learning Materials, Language Stimulation, Physical Environment, Caregiver Responsivity, Academic Stimulation, Modeling of Social Maturity, Variety in Experience, and Acceptance of Child.

While the CC-HOME Inventories cover both caregiver/child interaction and the general physical environment, they have two main limitations. They do not capture details of the curriculum used by providers. In addition, the CC-HOME Inventories yield less intensive coverage in most areas. However, the scales do include a wider range of levels of caregiving than other instruments — from minimally acceptable to high quality. The inventories may be a valuable tool for research, for family child care programs, or for state licensors to evaluate the experience of individual children in child care in a simple, accessible and easy to administer format.

Source: The Child Care HOME Inventories: assessing the quality of family child care homes, Robert H. Bradley, Bettye M.Caldwell, Robert F. Corwyn. Accepted for publication in Early Childhood Research Quarterly; available from ScienceDirect.

Facts in Action, September/October 2003