Survey of Child Care Subsidy Recipients in New York City, June 2008-July 2009 (ICPSR 32481)
Version Date: Aug 6, 2012 View help for published
Principal Investigator(s): View help for Principal Investigator(s)
Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, Columbia University. Teachers College;
Anne Martin, Columbia University. Teachers College
https://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR32481.v1
Version V1
Summary View help for Summary
The goal of this project was to explore associations among parental preferences for child care, parents' perceptions of care quality, subsidy policies, and the care arrangements that low-income working families in New York City use for their young children. The project relied on two data sources: (1) New York City administrative data on the entire population of subsidy recipients between January 2006 and December 2008 with children age six and younger to describe families' child care arrangements, and (2) a phone survey with a random sample of 2,045 families drawn from the administrative data and collected in two different waves. The first wave of data collection occurred between June 2008 and January 2009, the second wave occurred between February and July 2009. Due to the short interval between waves, no cohort effect was expected and the waves were merged into a single analytic sample, but the variable labels differentiate between the waves for future analysis.
Survey questions covered current child care arrangements, preferences for child care arrangements, satisfaction with subsidies, and experiences with subsidy enrollment and recertification. The administrative data were used to calculate the number and length of spells of subsidy use over the 36-month period. Children are classified according to subsidy mechanism (contract vs voucher) and population (public assistance vs low-income). Weights were created so survey respondents would generalize to the population of subsidy recipients as of February 2008 (including multiple children per family).
Using these data, the project aimed to answer four research questions:
- What are the dynamics of subsidy use? What is the duration of subsidy use?
- Is there a mismatch between parents' stated preferences for child care and the care that they actually use? What are the policy barriers that potentially prevent families from accessing the care that they prefer? Are there specific barriers faced by families who received vouchers (as opposed to those who receive care in a contracted setting) that affect their use of formal care?
- Are parental preferences for child care differentially associated with the use of formal versus informal care? How are parental perceptions of child care quality and parental work characteristics associated with the use of formal or informal care?
- Does the continuity of care depend on whether the care is informal or formal?
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Funding View help for Funding
Subject Terms View help for Subject Terms
Geographic Coverage View help for Geographic Coverage
Smallest Geographic Unit View help for Smallest Geographic Unit
city
Distributor(s) View help for Distributor(s)
Time Period(s) View help for Time Period(s)
Date of Collection View help for Date of Collection
Data Collection Notes View help for Data Collection Notes
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String variables containing various notes and further information regarding some of the other variables were not included in this data set, but may be accessed by contacting the Principle Investigator, Anne Martin at arm53@columbia.edu.
Sample View help for Sample
The survey sampling frame consisted of all children up to six years of age who received a child care subsidy in New York City in February 2008. The roster of subsidy recipients was obtained from administrative data provided by the New York City Administration for Children's Services, which oversees the city's subsidy system.
A total of 63,872 children aged 0-6 received subsidies in New York City in February 2008. To be eligible for inclusion in the present study, the child had to have contact information. Therefore, 10,091 cases lacking addresses and phone numbers were automatically excluded from the sample. An additional 6,469 cases appeared to be duplicates of existing cases, based on matching street addresses, and were dropped. Thus, the final population of interest consisted of 47,312 children. The analytic sample for the present study should be considered representative of this population, namely, "reachable" children up to age six who received a child care subsidy in New York City in February 2008. Additionally, for families with multiple children under six years of age, only one child was randomly selected for the sampling frame so that parents were not burdened by being asked to report on more than one child. The final number of families who received a survey then, was 5,610. Weights included in the dataset allows analysis to be representative of the total population of child care subsidy recipients as of February 2008.
Time Method View help for Time Method
Universe View help for Universe
Children up to six years of age with contact information (i.e. address, phone number) who received a child care subsidy in New York City in February 2008.
Unit(s) of Observation View help for Unit(s) of Observation
Data Type(s) View help for Data Type(s)
Mode of Data Collection View help for Mode of Data Collection
Description of Variables View help for Description of Variables
Survey questions covered the study child's current child care arrangements, as well as the mother's child care preferences, job schedule, subsidy recertification procedures and demographic information.
Response Rates View help for Response Rates
Of the 5,610 people in the sample, there were 2,045 responses.
HideOriginal Release Date View help for Original Release Date
2012-08-06
Version History View help for Version History
- Brooks-Gunn, Jeanne, and Anne Martin. Survey of Child Care Subsidy Recipients in New York City, June 2008-July 2009. ICPSR32481-v1. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2012-08-06. http://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR32481.v1
2012-08-06 ICPSR data undergo a confidentiality review and are altered when necessary to limit the risk of disclosure. ICPSR also routinely creates ready-to-go data files along with setups in the major statistical software formats as well as standard codebooks to accompany the data. In addition to these procedures, ICPSR performed the following processing steps for this data collection:
- Performed consistency checks.
- Created variable labels and/or value labels.
- Standardized missing values.
- Created online analysis version with question text.
- Checked for undocumented or out-of-range codes.
Weight View help for Weight
The weight included in the data set generalizes the data to the population of child care subsidy recipients in February 2008.
The post-stratification weighting adjusted for disproportionate sampling, differential survey response rates, and selection of one child per family across nine different cells (created by crossing subsidy payment mechanism/public assistance status by age group).
"wt," is a cell-specific value assigned to each case equal to the number of cases in the sampling frame its cell represents.
Two strata were also identified to define the weight -- "SURVAGE" indicates the three age groups of the children and "SURVSUBS" indicates into which of the three subsidy types the cell belongs. The "cell" variable defines the case by the child's age and the subsidy type, 1-9.
HideNotes
The public-use data files in this collection are available for access by the general public. Access does not require affiliation with an ICPSR member institution.
This study is maintained and distributed by the Child and Family Data Archive (CFData). CFData hosts datasets about young children, their families and communities, and the programs that serve them. CFData is supported by Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation (OPRE), an office of the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.