Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Access to quality early childhood education and care (ECEC) is essential in reaching societal objectives, including reducing the economic gender gap, decreasing the burden for struggling parents and increasing opportunities for the healthy development of children. To ensure the effectiveness of ECEC services in meeting these objectives, efficient and accurate tools for measuring the quality of ECEC services are needed. A number of such tools exist for measuring the quality of licensed child care centers. For example, the Assessment for Quality Improvement (AQI) is a measure of ECEC quality developed with the City of Toronto, that is being adopted in various jurisdictions across Canada. To date the versions of the AQI for classrooms that serve children of different ages within centres have been validated. However, measures for evaluating home-based child care settings are very limited. Since many children are being cared for in home child care it is important that we have valid and reliable measures for assessing quality in that context. This study describes the development and validation of the Home Child Care version of the AQI. Specifically, the process and analyses for establishing face, construct, and concurrent validity are presented. All phases of instrument development, including establishing the construct, consultations with the field experts, field testing, statistical analyses for scale refinement and psychometric analyses for scale validation are discussed. The developed measure has good psychometric properties and can be recommended for use in evaluating the quality of home-based child care settings.