Quality in home-based childcare providers: variations in process quality

Abstract

Child care quality in general, and caregiver-child interactions in particular, are salient predictors of children’s outcomes. While the importance of process quality is well known, the complex relations between structural quality and process quality are far less researched in family child care, compared to centre based child care. Flanders shows unique features to do so, considering its high enrolment rates of the youngest children and its large share of licenced family child care. We studied the emotional and educational process quality in 200 family child care providers in Flanders, Belgium, using CLASS Infant and CLASS Toddler. The results suggest that educational dimensions are significantly poorer than emotional aspects of caregiver-child interactions. Educational quality appeared the lowest in eating and snack time situations and for toddlers also in free play. While structural features partly explained variations in process quality, it is hardly possible to attribute this to single variables. However, some structural features seem to matter more than others. Pre-service training and supervision mattered, while years of experience did not.