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Li et al. - Coggle Diagram
Li et al.
Procedure
The NICHD study used the Observational Record of the Care-giving Environment (ORCE) to assess the quality of care at 6, 15, 24, 36 and 54 months. A score higher than 3.0 was chosen as indicating high quality care.
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Quality of care was judged by whether caregivers were sensitive to the children's needs, how much cognitive stimulation was provided and if the carers' fostered exploration.
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At 24 months the Bayley Mental Developmental Index was used to measure cognitive development. At 54 months, various Woodcock-Johnson tests were used to measure language, memory and IQ. What other variables were accounted for in the children?
Other variables assessed included ethnicity, health, gender, birth order, child temperament and maternal separation anxiety, as well as family income.
Li et al then classified the children into 4 main groups, according to the quality of childcare, firstly at the infant/ toddler stage and secondly at the pre-school stage:
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Statistical analysis was employed to investigate the relationship between the key variables identified. Individuals were matched as far as possible to iron out bias from child temperament, family situation etc. They were able to to show the standardised mean differences of the matched sample.
Aim
Weilin Li et al's 3 hypotheses, tested firstly the idea that high quality infant-toddler day care would improve cognitive outcomes at 24 months. However, unless the child also experienced high quality preschool care, these benefits would be lost.
Good day care in the pre-school stage will produce better outcomes at 54 months than those who had poor quality care.
They lastly predicted that the best outcomes regarding language, cognitive and pre-academic skills will be produced in children who have had high quality day care in both infant/ toddler and pre-school ages.
Strengths
This study shows strong practical application. It informs policy makers that good quality day care is of benefit to most children and that funding should ideally be provided continually from the infant/ toddler stage to the end of preschool. However if funding is limited, the most preschool benefits are gained from preschool care.
The detailed measures and assessments produce lots of rich, valid data
and the matched children, attention to potentially confounding variables, such as child temperament, and statistical analysis of data points to reliability of results.
Weaknesses
Although the large sample size would suggest good generalisability, the sample Li et al used was drawn largely from economically advantaged, white families, and teenage mothers and low birth weight babies were excluded. The sample can therefore be said to be unrepresentative of the USA population.
Because secondary data was used, it was not possible to control for variables such as selection bias and Li et al admit that they could only consider variables that could be observed, which may limit the validity of their findings.
Although there was a lot of careful matching in the study, there are likely to be variables that were not controlled for, which will reduce the reliability of the findings.