Ford – surveys

We are trying to take stock by doing a kind of snapshot of the situation of those working in early care and learning in B.C. every year. And because we can’t talk to everybody and collect data from everyone, we know we’re going to have to take a sample of people. So, we call this type of survey a cross-sectional survey because it’s kind of taking a cross-section at a particular point in time across a subset of everybody that we want to speak to. We’re probably getting the survey out to around 10% of the total population. But that’s giving us enough people to have a high level of confidence that the results will apply to the other 90% who aren’t responding in any one year.  

So, we do this cross-sectional survey of two groups, those who operate childcare centers. We call that the employer survey. And of those working in childcare centers, which can include those same managers, but of course includes all the other positions in those centers. And we do include those working at home and providing home-based care and even those who have the credential, Early Childhood Educator, but for one reason or another, are not currently working actually in the direct provision of childcare. So, we try to cover a lot of the issues that could be arising for workforce entry and exit by having this slightly broader cross-section that we look at. 

We always try as evaluators to triangulate our data to make sure that we have more than one way of understanding a situation, to make sure that we’re not making a mistake, because that can always be, you know, errors around a single data source. So although we do collect a lot of quantitative data that comes from administrative sources and we do our surveys, we also think it’s really important to include qualitative data collection to understand how, what those numbers mean,  

What I think has been interesting for this project is that the story that we’re getting from the case study sites, from the key informant interviews, matches up very closely to what we’re learning from the surveys where we ask people’s opinions or the quantitative data that we have on how many people are entering and leaving and the reasons for doing so. So, it gives us a lot of confidence that we’ve got a very good story that accurately captures what’s happening in the province and that we can, we and others, can have some confidence will be useful for making decisions in the future about what may need to change, what’s working fine, how we need to look for new areas to improve.