What Do Parents Want in Terms of Early Childhood Education and Care?

ABSTRACT

In the development of early childhood education and care (ECEC) policy, it is important to understand parents’ decision-making in terms of both preferences and pragmatic constraints. Traditional data collection techniques such as self-reported surveys can elucidate parental preferences, however, these may differ from their actual decisions. In our research we marry qualitative responses about ECEC preferences with the results of a quasi-behavioral conjoint analysis to explore whether there is an association between parents’ stated and revealed preferences. In this study, 631 parents of young children in Toronto answered an open-ended question about ECEC preferences and a choice-based conjoint survey in which they chose between hypothetical providers that varied across ECEC attributes. Research Findings: Pearson’s point bi-serial correlations between stated and revealed preferences found that associations were non-existent or weak. Parent characteristics (ethnicity, education, income and primary language) moderately influenced the strength of these correlations. Our findings suggest that parents may not be able to fully articulate their preferences for ECEC, and that their stated preferences may not match their decisions. Practice or Policy: This study may have important implications for policymakers and researchers, as our findings support the use of complementary methods to collect information about ECEC preferences from stakeholders.

Acknowledgments

We would like to express our gratitude to the McCain Foundation, City of Toronto and EarlyON Centres for supporting our research. We are grateful for the assistance of work study students: Caitlin Lynch-Staunton, Ava Persadmehr, Sajee Maheswaran, and Hillary Scott and to the students in the Rotman School of Management: Gowtham Ramachandran, Neil Kalita, Revathi Kolagani, Matthew Solda, Chawin Vajanopath, and Desmond Yeo. We would also like to acknowledge thoughtful comments of Pankaj Aggarwal, June Cotte, and Tanjim Hossain on earlier phases of this research. We would also like to thank Dr. Olesya Falenchuk for her assistance and expertise, and Maren Katz for her contributions as this project evolved.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Respondents were eligible for participation in the study if they had a child under the age of four, as determined by the survey questionnaire. Respondents who reported that their youngest child was over the age of four were thanked and sent to the survey exit page.

2. Costs of ECEC in the City of Toronto vary by the age of the child receiving care, and are categorized into three bands: infant, toddler and preschool. To reflect the differences in cost of care, three versions of the conjoint instrument were created to reflect real market costs for each band. The version of the survey presented was determined by the age of the respondent’s youngest child. Cost was also presented at a daily rate rather than monthly rate to incorporate the costs of part-time and flexible arrangements.

3. In the conjoint survey – cost and type are conditional on one another because lower cost care is more likely to be unlicensed care, and higher cost care is more likely to be licensed day care centers. This may result in some embedded mutual dependency across these two attributes.