Article selection and evaluation guide

¶ … Joy Pastan Greenberg & Jessica M. Kahn (2012): Early childhood education and care use: Differences by race/ethnicity and age, Journal of Children and Poverty, 18:1, 23-54

What is (are) the research question(s) or hypothesis (es) in this article?

The research question in the Greenberg and Kahn article is: does age and race/ethnicity affect the enrollment of children in relative, non-relative, and center-based care programs, and, if so, how? Specifically, because previous research has not differentiated age groups, the main hypothesis used in this study is that there will be differences in early childhood education and care use between children of differing ethnicities by age group.

Describe the subject population.

The research population in this study included Latino, white, and black children with children between 0 and 5 years old. To be included in the population, children had to be between 0 and 5 by December 31, 2004, could not be in kindergarten, and were not classified as "other" race.

3. Describe the research design or methodology

The sample was derived using public data from the children included in the Early Childhood Program Participation interview of the 2005 National Household Education Survey. Once the sample was determined, an analysis plan was applied to the data to look for variations. This included using a series of regression analyses, inducing ordinal least squares regression and multinomial logit regression. Theses methods were chosen to highlight within-group variation. To identify variations that occur across groups, multinomial regressions were used. Additionally, descriptive statistic techniques, including chi-squares and t-tests, were used to check for statistically significant differences.

4. Identify the dependent variables(s) and independent variable(s)

The independent variables used here include mother's marital status, maternal education, maternal employment, maternal birth location, maternal age of first birth, language of parents, household income, the number of siblings a child has, the child's age, and the child's gender. The dependent variables included the number of non-parental 1) care hours per week that each child was in and 2) arrangements for child care that were made per week. Also, the type of non-parental arrangements made for the children was a dependent variable.

5. Describe the results of the study