Out-of-home Child Care Research: A Cultural Perspective

This paper analyses the cultural context of inquiry and research into the effects of out-of-home child care on children’s development. In particular, it attempts to show how the study of such child care has been shaped by a Western world view in which white, middle class values and social ideology are particularly salient. The effects of this cultural context can be seen in the basic assumptions of studies on out-of-home child care, in the questions these studies pose for investigation, and in the motivation of the investigators engaged in this line of research. These in turn determine the research designs, the units of analysis for the examination of children’s functioning and of the child care environment, the operational definitions of variables, and the statistical procedures employed in many of these studies. The analysis begins by examining cultural variations in societal attitudes to out-of-home child care as a function of cultural context and basic assumptions concerning childhood, development, and the role ascribed to the family and the community at large in children’s development. The paper then proceeds to examine the relationship between cultural context and its valued developmental goals and the developmental outcomes studied in child care research. The relationships between goals set for child care, cultural beliefs concerning child-rearing practices, the definition of “quality of care” and the study of the relationship of home and child care, in child care research, are also examined. It then explores the major research questions and methodology concerning the effect of child care on development in the Anglo-American child care research tradition. The paper concludes with a discussion of implications for culturally sensitive routes to studying child care.