Chapter 8: Assessment of Caregiver–Child Interactions and Relationships in Infant/ Toddler Classrooms

For several decades, researchers have examined the experiences of young children in center-based childcare. As our understanding of children’s early education experiences has become more nuanced, social interactions and relationship quality with adult caregivers have emerged as two of the most important dimensions of those experiences (Burchinal & Cryer, 2003; Sabol & Pianta, 2012). Childcare quality has been described along two dimensions: structural quality, which includes features that can be regulated such as adult-child ratio or health and safety standards; and process quality, which describes the nature of children’s interactions and relationships with adults and peers. Global quality includes elements of both structure and process.