Ford – key informant interviews

As evaluators, we have to be very clear about what we’re doing. So, from the outset, we were clear we weren’t evaluating the work that was being done and weren’t observing the children. But we were interested in how the ECE’s viewed their working conditions, and how aware they were of the efforts that were being made by this government strategy to improve those working conditions, and how they were actually working out in practice for them in trying to access the supports and move through their careers being supported by them. What did they see as the barriers and did they talk to us about any ways in which these government supports potentially were making a difference.  

It was quite important also that we represented a wide variety of different centres. We went through a process with our steering committee to make sure that the visits that we did, which determined the interviews that we would get to do with everybody who was at each of these centers, that they were going to include Indigenous operated centers, they were going to include privately operated versus publicly operated. They were going to be in the north of the province, the south, urban areas, and that we captured a broad range of the experience.  

With qualitative research or qualitative data collection we’re not as concerned with getting a fully representative snapshot as making sure that we’re hearing all the views. And we did this with a kind of scheme or a framework which allowed us to identify initially six centers that we would visit and interview everybody at, and then a subset of interviews where we would just talk to one or two people. We talked to licensing officers, we talked to those who were responsible for running ECE education programs in post- secondary. We talked to home-based carers to make sure that we had a full cross-section of those kind of in-depth perceptions of how this strategy was rolling out and how working conditions were being affected. We got different stories from each, which I think is quite important.