Although the effects of childcare quality on low income children and parents are well documented, less is known about how local communities vary in the provision of childcare to this population. Indiana is a state where a high proportion of childcare programs are exempt from licensing and in which many childcare spending decisions are made at the county level (e.g., quality dollars). This three-phase study addresses these issues by studying the childcare experiences of low-income working parents and their children (infants/toddlers and preschoolers) across four different counties in Indiana. The goals of the research are:

• Describe how communities vary in the funding and provision of childcare services to low –income working families (both families transitioning off TANF as well as stably employed, lower wage earning families)
• Investigate how these community variations affect the quality of care received by children from low-income working families, and
• Relate these factors to children’s developmental outcomes (cognitive and social) as well as parent employment outcomes (e.g., employment continuity, hours of employment, absences, and time lost from work).

Phase 1:
Twenty-four community key informants were interviewed and eight parent focus groups were conducted. In addition, parent survey data on the process and outcome of searching for child care are being gathered and existing community-level data collected by the Bureau of Child Development in the Indiana Family and Social Services have been analyzed. These data describe child care utilization and identify important community childcare context variables that affect low income working families ability to find and keep child care.

Phase 2:
Three hundred working poor families whose young children in out-of-home child care (75 in each community; approximately split between infant/toddlers and preschoolers) and their childcare providers in four Indiana counties are being observed using measures of childcare structural and process quality, cognitive and social development outcomes for children, and parent employment outcomes.

Phase 3:
The final year of the project, involves analysis of the data and writing reports of the results and their policy implications. A model for the analysis of quantitative data is depicted below.