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

Studies of the impact of child care experiences on child outcomes must cons ider family selection factors because children from more advantaged familie s tend to attend higher quality child care and are more likely to be in cen ter care than children from less advantaged families. Although this issue i s widely recognized, developmentalists and economists have used different s tatistical 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 co nsidered in child care research and provides empirical evidence demonstrati ng why each issue should be considered. These issues include whether causal inferences can be made from observational studies and the impact on conclu sions from regression analyses that include highly correlated measures of c hild care experiences, nonrepresentative samples, and family covariates wit h bi-directional effects on child care quality.