DOI: 10.3886/icpsr32481.v1
title: Survey of Child Care Subsidy Recipients in New York City, June 2008-July 2009
title: Version 1

description: The goal of this project was to explore associations among parental preferences for child care, parents' perceptions of care quality, subsidy policies, and the care arrangements that low-income working families in New York City use for their young children. The project relied on two data sources: (1) New York City administrative data on the entire population of subsidy recipients between January 2006 and December 2008 with children age six and younger to describe families' child care arrangements, and (2) a phone survey with a random sample of 2,045 families drawn from the administrative data and collected in two different waves. The first wave of data collection occurred between June 2008 and January 2009, the second wave occurred between February and July 2009. Due to the short interval between waves, no cohort effect was expected and the waves were merged into a single analytic sample, but the variable labels differentiate between the waves for future analysis.
Survey questions covered current child care arrangements, preferences for child care arrangements, satisfaction with subsidies, and experiences with subsidy enrollment and recertification. The administrative data were used to calculate the number and length of spells of subsidy use over the 36-month period. Children are classified according to subsidy mechanism (contract vs voucher) and population (public assistance vs low-income). Weights were created so survey respondents would generalize to the population of subsidy recipients as of February 2008 (including multiple children per family).
Using these data, the project aimed to answer four research questions:
What are the dynamics of subsidy use? What is the duration of subsidy use?
Is there a mismatch between parents' stated preferences for child care and the care that they actually use? What are the policy barriers that potentially prevent families from accessing the care that they prefer? Are there specific barriers faced by families who received vouchers (as opposed to those who receive care in a contracted setting) that affect their use of formal care?
Are parental preferences for child care differentially associated with the use of formal versus informal care? How are parental perceptions of child care quality and parental work characteristics associated with the use of formal or informal care?
Does the continuity of care depend on whether the care is informal or formal?
description: Survey questions covered the study child's current child care arrangements, as well as the mother's child care preferences, job schedule, subsidy recertification procedures and demographic information.
description: The weight included in the data set generalizes the data to the population of child care subsidy recipients in February 2008. 
The post-stratification weighting adjusted for disproportionate sampling, differential survey response rates, and selection of one child per family across nine different cells (created by crossing subsidy payment mechanism/public assistance status by age group).
"wt," is a cell-specific value assigned to each case equal to the number of cases in the sampling frame its cell represents. 
 Two strata were also identified to define the weight -- "SURVAGE" indicates the three age groups of the children and "SURVSUBS" indicates into which of the three subsidy types the cell belongs. The "cell" variable defines the case by the child's age and the subsidy type, 1-9.
description: Response Rates: Of the 5,610 people in the sample, there were 2,045 responses.
description: The survey sampling frame consisted of all children up to six years of age who received a child care subsidy in New York City in February 2008. The roster of subsidy recipients was obtained from administrative data provided by the New York City Administration for Children's Services, which oversees the city's subsidy system.
A total of 63,872 children aged 0-6 received subsidies in New York City in February 2008. To be eligible for inclusion in the present study, the child had to have contact information. Therefore, 10,091 cases lacking addresses and phone numbers were automatically excluded from the sample. An additional 6,469 cases appeared to be duplicates of existing cases, based on matching street addresses, and were dropped. Thus, the final population of interest consisted of 47,312 children. The analytic sample for the present study should be considered representative of this population, namely, "reachable" children up to age six who received a child care subsidy in New York City in February 2008. Additionally, for families with multiple children under six years of age, only one child was randomly selected for the sampling frame so that parents were not burdened by being asked to report on more than one child. The final number of families who received a survey then, was 5,610. Weights included in the dataset allows analysis to be representative of the total population of child care subsidy recipients as of February 2008.
description: Datasets: 
DS0: Study-Level Files
DS1: Survey Data
DS2: Age Stratum at Time of Survey (Online Analysis Only)
DS3: Subsidy Type Stratum at Time of Survey (Online Analysis Only)
description: Children up to six years of age with contact information (i.e. address, phone number) who received a child care subsidy in New York City in February 2008. Smallest Geographic Unit: city
description: record abstracts; telephone interviewString variables containing various notes and further information regarding some of the other variables were not included in this data set, but may be accessed by contacting the Principle Investigator, Anne Martin at arm53@columbia.edu.