Abstract
This paper assesses the psychometric properties of four child care quality instruments administered in 404 child care centers in Ecuador: the Classroom Assessment Scoring System for Toddlers, the Infant/Toddler Environment Rating Scale–Revised Edition, the Child Care Infant/Toddler Home Observation for Measurement of the Environment, and the Missouri Infant/Toddler Responsive Caregiving Checklist. We examined their internal consistency, tested the underlying subscale structure by means of confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), verified construct validity by testing associations with quality-related factors (e.g., child-caregiver ratio), and checked concurrent validity of the instruments’ total scores. We found high internal consistency of the instruments at the full scale level and moderate to high at the subscale/domain level. CFA showed high factor loadings, but goodness of fit statistics were low. Construct validity results varied from low to very low depending on the quality-related factor, and concurrent validity from low to very high depending on the instruments compared. This validity exercise provides useful information for policy-makers and researchers interested in using these instruments in the Ecuadorian context or elsewhere in the region. The findings will also inform future research and development of affordable and culturally-appropriate tools for monitoring process quality in child care centers in Latin American countries.
Highlights
In recent years, countries in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) have made a considerable investment in expanding child care coverage for young children
We examined internal consistency, tested the underlying subscale structure by means of confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), and, due to the lack of child development indicators as validators in our data, we verified construct validity by testing associations with socio-economic status and structural quality-related factors
Apart from a study by Kane and Staiger [23] for the U.S, we found no other studies that have undertaken this type of exercise, in LAC or elsewhere, because of the difficulty of administering such a diverse set of measures to a single sample
Summary
Countries in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) have made a considerable investment in expanding child care coverage for young children. The quality of child care centers can be quite low [1,2,3]. Countries in the region face the challenge of ensuring the quality of the child care services they offer, given that children who attend these centers do so during a critical period in their development. In the LAC context, the importance of providing quality early care to children is related to the notion of children’s rights, which is a relatively new concept but one that is widely accepted in the region. The rights approach recognizes children as individuals with legal rights who are equal before any law and policy.
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