Enhancing Disaster Management: Development of a Spatial Database of Day Care Centers in the USA

Nagendra Singh,Budhendra Bhaduri,Mark Tuttle

doi:10.3390/ijgi4031290

Abstract

Children under the age of five constitute around 7% of the total U.S. population, and represent a segment of the population that is totally dependent on others for day-to-day activities. A significant proportion of this population spends time in some form of day care arrangement while their parents are away from home. Accounting for those children during emergencies is of high priority, which requires a broad understanding of the locations of such day care centers. As concentrations of at risk population, the spatial location of day care centers is critical for any type of emergency preparedness and response (EPR). However, until recently, the U.S. emergency preparedness and response community did not have access to a comprehensive spatial database of day care centers at the national scale. This paper describes an approach for the development of the first comprehensive spatial database of day care center locations throughout the U.S. utilizing a variety of data harvesting techniques to integrate information from widely disparate data sources followed by geolocating for spatial precision. In the context of disaster management, such spatially refined demographic databases hold tremendous potential for improving high-resolution population distribution and dynamics models and databases.

Highlights

Children are one of the greatest priorities of our society and are dependent on parents as they grow up in their home
Based on the classification by the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), day care can be broadly grouped into two major types: relative or non-relative
Non-relative care is comprised of organized day care services, which constitute around two-thirds of total child care, while the rest one-third of day care services are provided by individuals, usually at their residence

Summary

Introduction

Children are one of the greatest priorities of our society and are dependent on parents as they grow up in their home. Based on the classification by the SIPP, day care can be broadly grouped into two major types: relative (where day care service provided by relatives of the child which could include father, mother, siblings, or grandparents) or non-relative (that includes day care centers, head starts, family based day care or service provided by individuals who are non-relatives). Non-relative care is comprised of organized day care services (day care centers), which constitute around two-thirds of total child care, while the rest one-third of day care services are provided by individuals, usually at their residence (home based day care). Of the remaining 7.7 million kids, approximately 2.3 million are cared for by non-relatives in residential facilities, where the number of kids can range from 1 to 12 and which can increase for school aged kids. The average amount of time that preschool aged children with employed mothers spend in a day care is 36 hours per week, while the average for those with unemployed mothers is 21 hours per week

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