Family selection and child care experiences: Implications for studies of child outcomes

Studies of the impact of child care experiences on child outcomes must consider family selection factors because children from more advantaged families tend to attend higher quality child care and are more likely to be in center care than children from less advantaged families. Although this issue is widely recognized, developmentalists and economists have used different statistical methods when testing whether child care experiences are related to child outcomes and have drawn different conclusions from their analyses. This paper discusses some of the family selection issues that should be considered in child care research and provides empirical evidence demonstrating why each issue should be considered. These issues include whether causal inferences can be made from observational studies and the impact on conclusions from regression analyses that include highly correlated measures of child care experiences, nonrepresentative samples, and family covariates with bi-directional effects on child care quality.