Development of a Quality Measure for the Child Care Service in Regional Level

This paper is to develop a quality measure to evaluate the quality level of child care service in the regional level. By utilizing the biannual intensive child care statistical reports, ten variables are integrated and summarized as a quality measure for child care service in regional level by employing Principal Component Analysis (PCA). Conclusively, it is possible to get a comprehensive measure and the measure obtained from data between 2003 and 2008 illustrates the difference in child care service quality among regions over years. With the measure developed by this research, each region can also get very good insight into what kinds of factors of child care service should be paid more attention to in order to improve the quality of its child care service. Moreover, the measure obtained in this paper is proven reliable and robust in that it reflects the quality of child care service in each region and gives us statistically uniform quality scores with a different data set.