scholarly journals How stable is program quality in child care centre classrooms?

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Petr Varmuza ◽  
Michal Perlman ◽  
Olesya Falenchuk
Keyword(s):  
Child Care ◽  
Program Planning ◽  
Classroom Quality ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Child Care Centre ◽  
Educator Training ◽  
Education And Care ◽  
The Stability ◽  
Quality Assessments ◽  
Over Time

AbstractIn the Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) sector there is a move to reduce oversight costs by reducing the frequency of quality assessments in providers who score highly consistently across time. However, virtually nothing is known about the stability of ECEC quality assessments over time. Using a validated measure of overall classroom quality, we examined stability of quality in a sample of over 1000 classrooms in licensed child care centres in Toronto, Canada over a 3-year period. Multilevel mixed-effects linear regression analyses revealed substantial instability across all types of ECEC centres, although publicly operated centres were somewhat more stable and tended to have higher quality scores. We also found substantial variance between classrooms within ECEC centres. None of the structural, child/family and neighbourhood characteristics we examined were significantly related to stability of quality ratings. The lack of stability found in our sample does not support the use of a risk-based approach to quality oversight in ECEC. Large within centre classroom quality variance suggest that all classrooms within a centre should be assessed individually. Furthermore, classroom level scores should be posted when scores are made public as part of accountability systems. Future research should, in addition to administrative data used in our study, explore how factors such as educator training, participation in program planning, reflective practices and ongoing learning might improve stability of quality over time.

scholarly journals “How about We Give It a Go?”: A Case Study on Supporting Breastfeeding Families in an Australian Child Care Centre

Children ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (11) ◽  
pp. 195
Author(s):  
Emma Woolley ◽  
Shirley Wyver
Keyword(s):  
Child Care ◽  
World Health ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Care Centre ◽  
Breastfeeding Support ◽  
Child Care Centre ◽  
Collective Case Study ◽  
Instrumental Case Study ◽  
Health Organization

The World Health Organization (WHO) recommends exclusive breastfeeding for six months and continuation of breastfeeding for up to two years. Formal child care has an important role in supporting breastfeeding, as many Australian infants commence care before two years of age. Currently, little is known about support or barriers in child care contexts. The present qualitative instrumental case study explores practices which protect, promote and support breastfeeding at a child care centre located in the Australian Capital Territory’s outer suburbs. Extending from a previously published collective case study, a cultural-institutional focus of analysis was used to explore the roles of proximity, flexibility and communication in supporting breastfeeding within a child care centre located close to an infant’s home. Interviews with centre staff and mothers, triangulated with observations of the centre environment and policy documents provide insight into the environment. Affirming the roles of flexibility in routine and staff rostering and two-way communication, findings suggest longer-term benefits may be derived from selecting a child care centre close to an infant’s home, provided mothers can overcome barriers to breastmilk expression in the workplace. The study recognises the role of non-lactating caregivers in the transition to formal child care, and of the support culture for educators who breastfeed. This study extends the knowledge base of breastfeeding support interventions in the child care setting to inform future research and policy.

scholarly journals Child care policy and child care burden: Policy feedback effects and distributive implications of regulatory decisions

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Adrienne Davidson ◽  
Samantha Burns ◽  
Linda White ◽  
Delaine Hampton ◽  
Michal Perlman
Keyword(s):  
Child Care ◽  
Lower Income ◽  
Policy Feedback ◽  
Feedback Effects ◽  
Public Subsidies ◽  
Education And Care ◽  
Policies And Programs ◽  
Regulatory Decisions ◽  
Quality Assessments ◽  
The City

The policy feedback literature highlights that the design of public policies can affect recipients’ experience of those policies and programs. In this paper, we examine the largely unexplored distributional implications of market-based early childhood education and care (ECEC) services. We present the results of a quasi-behavioral conjoint survey of 606 parents in the City of Toronto. Grouping parent respondents by income and access to public subsidies, we find evidence that access to public subsidies influences the ECEC preferences of lower income parents. We explore these findings with respect to how non-subsidized lower income parents experience the market for ECEC. We find evidence that non-subsidized lower income parents are more cost-conscious; this is likely to result in their using less well-regulated ECEC that is more variable in quality. In turning to less well-regulated care, the burden of performing oversight and quality assessments falls on these parents. However, our study finds that lower income non-subsidized parents report the least engagement with learning about ECEC, suggesting that they are likely to be the least able to effectively monitor their children’s care arrangements. We explore the implications of these findings regarding the effects of policy on vulnerable children’s access to high quality ECEC services.

Corporate dividend policy revisited

2015 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 126-144 ◽  
Author(s):  
H. Kent Baker ◽  
Rob Weigand
Keyword(s):  
Dividend Policy ◽  
Payout Policy ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Stylized Facts ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Dividend Policies ◽  
Popular View ◽  
The Stability ◽  
Practical Implications ◽  
Over Time

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview and synthesis of some important literature on dividend policy, chronicle changing perspectives and trends, provide stylized facts, offer practical implications, and suggest avenues for future research. Design/methodology/approach – The authors provide a survey of literature surveys with a focus on insights for paying cash dividends. Findings – The analysis of literature surveys on dividend policy provides some stylized facts. For example, US evidence indicates that the importance of cash dividends as a part of investors’ total returns has declined over time. Share repurchases now play an increasingly important role in payout policy in countries permitting stock buybacks. The popular view is that dividend policy is important, as evidenced by the large amount of money involved and the attention that firms, security analysts, and investors give to dividends. Firms tend to follow a managed dividend policy rather than a residual dividend policy, which involves paying dividends from earnings left over after meeting investment needs while maintaining its target capital structure. Certain determinants of cash dividends are consistently important over time in shaping actual dividend policies including the stability of past dividends and current and anticipated earnings. No universal set of factors is appropriate for all firms because dividend policy is sensitive to numerous factors including firm characteristics, market characteristics, and substitute forms of dividends. Universal or one-size-fits-all theories or explanations for why companies pay dividends are too simplistic. Practical implications – The dividend puzzle remains an important topic in modern finance. Originality/value – This is the first a survey of literature surveys on cash dividends.

scholarly journals Exploring trajectories of emergency department visits using a laboratory-based indicator of serious illness

2019 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 205-217
Author(s):  
Ofir Ben-Assuli ◽  
Rema Padman ◽  
Itamar Shabtai
Keyword(s):  
Emergency Department ◽  
Medical Condition ◽  
Developmental Trajectories ◽  
Emergency Department Visits ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Electronic Health Record Data ◽  
Serious Illness ◽  
Targeted Interventions ◽  
The Stability ◽  
Over Time

Repeated emergency department visits have become a serious challenge worldwide. Despite prior research indicating that laboratory results may provide early alerts about such patients on their upcoming adverse events, few studies have examined their role as a critical indicator of the stability of a patient’s medical condition over time. We model and analyze the developmental trajectories of patients’ creatinine levels, a key laboratory marker of serious illness, as a potential risk stratification mechanism across many emergency department visits. We apply group-based statistical methodology to electronic health record data of 70,385 patients, with 3–15 emergency department visits, to identify and profile these trajectories for the entire population, for males and for females. Results reveal three distinct creatinine-based trajectory groups over time with significantly differing characteristics that may enable targeted interventions for each group. Future research will incorporate additional disease markers to identify longitudinal factors leading to repeated emergency department visits.

scholarly journals There was no golden age: social mobility into cultural and creative occupations

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Orian Brook ◽  
Dave O'Brien ◽  
Mark Taylor
Keyword(s):  
Public Policy ◽  
Longitudinal Study ◽  
Social Mobility ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
Cultural Theory ◽  
Creative Industries ◽  
Future Research ◽  
The Stability ◽  
Cultural And Creative Industries ◽  
Over Time

Cultural and creative industries are currently narrated as one of the greatest forces for openness and social mobility that Britain has (Hancock 2016). However, there is little, if any, evidence to support this position. Recent research has suggested the creative and cultural occupations are dominated by those from professional or managerial backgrounds (O’Brien et al 2016, Oakley et al 2017), with cultural theorists arguing this reflects declining rates of social mobility over time (Banks 2017). This paper provides the first empirical assessment of claims made by policy and cultural theory concerning changing patterns of social mobility into cultural and creative occupations. We use the England and Wales Longitudinal Study, along with three birth cohort studies, to offer the first analysis of social mobility into cultural and creative occupations over time. We demonstrate that: cultural and creative occupations have always been characterised by overrepresentations of those from privileged social origins, with little evidence of a classless meritocracy; rates of absolute social mobility are declining in these occupations, contradicting policymakers’ faith in a ‘meritocracy’ for talented individuals aiming to work in artistic and cultural jobs; this decline in absolute levels of social mobility is in contrast to the stability in relative social mobility, indicating there was no ‘golden age’ for social mobility into cultural occupations. These three points illustrate the importance of occupational perspectives on cultural and creative industries and the value of sociological analysis for public policy questions in this area. In particular, the lack of social fluidity in the occupations producing culture is a key issue for future public policy intervention. The paper concludes with suggestions for future research on longevity of cultural careers and the importance of gender using the Longitudinal Study dataset.

On the Robustness of Solution Strategy Classifications

2010 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 68-73 ◽  
Author(s):  
María José Contreras ◽  
Víctor J. Rubio ◽  
Daniel Peña ◽  
José Santacreu
Keyword(s):  
Individual Differences ◽  
Study Strategies ◽  
Solution Strategy ◽  
Specific Test ◽  
Spatial Tasks ◽  
The Stability ◽  
Strategy Changes ◽  
Over Time

Individual differences in performance when solving spatial tasks can be partly explained by differences in the strategies used. Two main difficulties arise when studying such strategies: the identification of the strategy itself and the stability of the strategy over time. In the present study strategies were separated into three categories: segmented (analytic), holistic-feedback dependent, and holistic-planned, according to the procedure described by Peña, Contreras, Shih, and Santacreu (2008) . A group of individuals were evaluated twice on a 1-year test-retest basis. During the 1-year interval between tests, the participants were not able to prepare for the specific test used in this study or similar ones. It was found that 60% of the individuals kept the same strategy throughout the tests. When strategy changes did occur, they were usually due to a better strategy. These results prove the robustness of using strategy-based procedures for studying individual differences in spatial tasks.

On the Stability of Evaluative Conditioning Effects

2013 ◽  
Vol 44 (6) ◽  
pp. 380-389 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sabine Förderer ◽  
Christian Unkelbach
Keyword(s):  
Evaluative Conditioning ◽  
Indirect Measures ◽  
The Stability ◽  
Over Time

Evaluative conditioning (EC) refers to valence changes in neutral stimuli (CSs) through repeated pairing with liked or disliked stimuli (USs). The present study examined the stability of EC effects in the course of 1 week. We investigated how this stability depends on memory for US valence and US identity. We also investigated whether CSs evaluations occurring immediately after conditioning (i.e., evaluative consolidation) are necessary for stable EC effects. Participants showed stable EC effects on direct and indirect measures, independent of evaluations immediately after conditioning. EC effects depended on memory for US valence but not for US identity. And although memory decreased significantly over time, EC effects remained stable. These data suggest that evaluative consolidation is not necessary, and that conditioned preferences and attitudes might persist even when people do not remember the concrete source anymore.

Supplier Development at LG Electronics

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hyojin Kim ◽  
Daesik Hur ◽  
Tobias Schoenherr
Keyword(s):  
Management Practice ◽  
Digital Technologies ◽  
Supply Management ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Supplier Development ◽  
Environmentally Conscious ◽  
Competitive Capabilities ◽  
The Stability ◽  
Buyer Firm

Supplier development has been a critical supply management practice since the 1990s. In many instances, it has even become imperative for buyer firms to support and prepare their supply bases for uncertain economic and market environments, socially and environmentally conscious customers, advances in digital technologies, and increasing competition. Yet, research that approaches supplier development with the objective to advance all these dimensions in an integrated fashion is scarce. This study fills this void by exploring how a buyer firm may address these emerging challenges in its supply base. Specifically, an in-depth case study of LG Electronics explores how the firm designs and operates multidimensional supplier development activities to foster the stability and sustainability of its supply base while enhancing its core suppliers’ competitive capabilities. This chapter illustrates how supplier development can be taken to the next level, presents implications for managerial practice, and outlines promising future research avenues.

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