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Child Care and Child Development: Results from the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development. Edited by The NICHD Early Child Care Research Network. New York, NY: The Guilford Press, 2005. Hardcover, 474 pages, $25.00
As the number of mothers in the United States entering the workforce grew rapidly between the 1970s and 1990s, questions about the effects of child care on young children's development and mother-child relationships were raised by parents and policymakers. This was the impetus for the National Institute on Child and Human Development (NICHD) to embark on a 10-site, longitudinal study tracking the development of 1,364 children starting in infancy to examine the effects of child care. Data from this comprehensive study were presented in over 116 scientific articles to date, and this book contains abridged versions of the most important papers. The study advanced understanding of the effects of child care by improving on the experimental designs used in previous studies and including follow-up measures.
The quality of the data in the study was enhanced by reporting attrition rates, observer training and reliability, and exclusion criteria (e.g., mothers who did not speak English and families who lived in dangerous neighborhoods). Methods of data collection included interviews with mothers and care providers in person and by phone as well as observations of, and standardized assessments with, children in their homes, in laboratories, in child care settings, and in classrooms at 1, 6, 15, 24, 36, and 54 months and in first grade. Observers were trained using manuals, meetings with investigators, videotapes, feedback, and evaluations. These methodological procedures were carefully and clearly described throughout the book.
Child care was defined in this study as care by anyone other than the child's mother for more than 10 hours per week. Measures for the study were selected based on the conceptualization that variables of the child care environment, the home environment, and the child intermingle to predict children's development. The variables of interest in the child care setting were the number of hours in care, the age at which children entered child care, the type of care (e.g., home, center), the number of care arrangements, and tine quality of care. Quality of child care was assessed using the Observational Record of the...