ABSTRACT

Child care quality in general, and caregiver-child interactions in particular, are salient predictors of children’s outcomes. While the importance of process quality is well known, the complex relations between structural quality and process quality are far less researched in family child care, compared to centre based child care. Flanders shows unique features to do so, considering its high enrolment rates of the youngest children and its large share of licenced family child care. We studied the emotional and educational process quality in 200 family child care providers in Flanders, Belgium, using CLASS Infant and CLASS Toddler. The results suggest that educational dimensions are significantly poorer than emotional aspects of caregiver-child interactions. Educational quality appeared the lowest in eating and snack time situations and for toddlers also in free play. While structural features partly explained variations in process quality, it is hardly possible to attribute this to single variables. However, some structural features seem to matter more than others. Pre-service training and supervision mattered, while years of experience did not.

摘要

总体而言，儿童保育质量，尤其是保育者与儿童之间的互动，是儿童结局的重要预测指标。尽管过程质量的重要性众所周知，但与基于中心的儿童保育相比，在家庭儿童保育中，结构质量与过程质量之间复杂的关系的研究还很少。考虑到法兰德斯（Flanders）年龄最小的儿童入学率高以及获得许可的家庭托儿服务的较大份额，法兰德斯具有独特的功能。我们使用CLASS Infant和CLASS Toddler在比利时的法兰德斯（Flanders）研究了200名家庭托儿服务提供者的情感和教育过程质量。结果表明，教育方面比照顾者-儿童互动的情感方面要差得多。在吃和吃零食的时候，教育质量似乎是最低的，对于幼儿来说也是免费的。尽管结构特征部分解释了过程质量的变化，但几乎不可能将其归因于单个变量。但是，某些结构特征似乎比其他特征更重要。职前培训和监督很重要，而多年的经验却没有。