Introduction
Millions of families with children from birth to age 12 rely on home-based child care (HBCC)—early care and education (ECE) offered in a provider’s or child’s home. Research on HBCC settings, however, lags behind research on center-based ECE settings, Head Start, and prekindergarten. Moreover, within HBCC, regulated family child care (FCC) providers are more likely to be the focus of research than family, friend, and neighbor (FFN) providers. Generally, the field lacks research about how the dynamics of HBCC availability and the features of HBCC settings relate to child and family outcomes.
To build the evidence base on HBCC availability and quality, the Home-Based Child Care Supply and Quality (HBCCSQ) project, funded by the Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation (OPRE) within the Administration for Children and Families (ACF), developed an equity-focused research—or learning—agenda. The goal of an equity-focused research agenda is to use research to help ensure everyone, especially people from historically excluded and/or marginalized communities, has fair and equitable access to resources and opportunities and the capacity to take advantage of them. An equity-focused research agenda asks questions and pursues research that helps uncover how historical or current policies and prejudice might create roadblocks, or inequities, for particular groups and what might be needed to address these inequities and level the field of opportunity for those groups. Children and families from underserved communities—including communities of color, communities of people from immigrant backgrounds, areas of concentrated poverty, and rural communities—are much more likely to experience these inequities than are children and families in other groups. The agenda is a proposed set of research questions about how the conditions and systems that affect HBCC and how HBCC providers’ practices and experiences influence positive and equitable outcomes for children and families in these HBCC settings.
Purpose
The research agenda is intended to (1) help ACF, state and local agencies, and other stakeholders deepen their understanding of HBCC availability and quality, and the factors that influence its availability and quality; (2) reveal key gaps in knowledge and data and propose research questions that can help fill those gaps; (3) propose study designs to inform policy and practice; and (4) set the stage for the HBCCSQ project’s next steps.
Key Findings and Highlights
The HBCCSQ research agenda provides a pathway to understanding how to improve equity in ECE. It prioritizes research questions that can help the field understand and address some of the systemic, institutional, and community-based factors that perpetuate inequitable experiences among HBCC providers, children, and families, many of whom live in underserved communities. It also prioritizes questions that highlight features of quality that are implemented differently or are more likely to occur in HBCC than in other ECE settings. The implementation of these features might support more positive outcomes for children and families in HBCC. The research agenda also highlights the need to better understand how access to resources, policies, and programs can support HBCC providers in offering opportunities that build equitable and positive outcomes for children and families. The research questions in the agenda are grouped under the following four topic areas:
- Availability of HBCC, the providers who offer it, and the families who use it
- HBCC provider experiences caring for children and families, and the relationship between quality features and outcomes
- Policy contexts in which HBCC operates, including the opportunities and challenges associated with these policies and regulations
- ECE and community-oriented strategies (such as FCC networks and play and learn groups) that contribute to HBCC providers’ engagement in quality improvement
For each question in the agenda, research should examine how characteristics vary both within and across HBCC settings, provider backgrounds, the children and families who use HBCC, and the communities in which HBCC is provided. This research should also consider how these categories of characteristics intersect or interact with one another in different ways. In addition, throughout the research agenda, there are questions exploring the ongoing challenges and pressures faced by HBCC providers during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Methods
The research agenda builds on the knowledge and insights of ACF, previous project tasks, and experts, including the following activities:
- A targeted literature review that synthesized existing evidence on HBCC quality and illuminated the gaps in research on HBCC quality.
- Development of a conceptual framework that includes components of quality in HBCC; factors and influences associated with quality; and hypothesized child and family outcomes.
- A review focused on quality measures and indicators used in research, quality rating and improvement systems, and accreditation processes. The review showed gaps in measurement that will help guide development of future measures.
- A data scan that identified and described the information currently available from selected states and from national studies about HBCC availability and quality.
- Group and individual discussions with research and practice experts, including (1) a group of research experts convened by the project; (2) the Office of Child Care’s Collaborative for FCC; (3) state and regional representatives from the National Association for Family Child Care; and (4) a learning community of organizations that receive funding from the Packard Foundation and deliver a variety of activities to FFN caregivers in California.
Recommendations
This report presents recommendations for four research activities that can help fill gaps, which is critical for advancing knowledge of HBCC availability and quality, and could be carried out through the HBCCSQ project. These recommendations include:
- Analysis of data from the 2012 and 2019 National Survey of Early Care and Education, which are primary sources of nationally representative information about HBCC providers
- A multisite mixed-methods study of HBCC, with a particular focus on FFN in underserved communities, which has received less attention in prior research
- Case studies of state and local ECE systems and community-oriented strategies designed to support HBCC
- Measures development focused on quality features that are implemented differently or are more likely to occur in HBCC than in other ECE settings, but where there is little or no research
Citation
Del Grosso, Patricia, Juliet Bromer, Toni Porter, Christopher Jones, Ann Li, Sally Atkins-Burnett, and Nikki Aikens (2021). A Research Agenda for Home-Based Child Care. OPRE Report #2021-218. Washington, DC: Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation, Administration for Children and Families, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Related Documents
| File Type | File Name | File Size | HBCCSQ Research Agenda Executive Summary 2021 | 452.35 KB |
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Glossary
- Family child care (FCC):
- refers to regulated (licensed, certified, or registered) HBCC.
- Family, friend, and neighbor (FFN) :
- care refers to HBCC that is legally exempt from licensing or other regulation, whether paid or unpaid. FFN care includes care given by grandparents, other relatives, and non-relatives.
- Home-based child care (HBCC) providers:
- are a heterogeneous population of providers who offer care and education to children in their own or the child’s home. (Although we use “HBCC” throughout the report, we recognize the role providers play both caring for and educating children.) Providers’ HBCC status is fluid, and individuals’ roles may change—those who care for a few children who are related to them, whether with or without pay; those who offer care as a professional occupation and a business; those who care for children over many years; and those who care for children sporadically in response to changing family needs. We assume a variety of factors influence these patterns, which may shift over time.