Understanding the Early Years - Early Childhood Development in Southwestern Newfoundland - June 2002

I. Introduction

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A. What this study is about

Understanding the Early Years (UEY) is an initiative that provides information to help strengthen the research capacity of communities to make informed decisions about the best policies and most appropriate programs to serve families with young children. It seeks to provide information about the influence of community factors on young children's development, and to enhance community capacity to use these data to monitor early childhood development, and to create effective community-based supports. Data describing the outcomes of children ages 5 and 6, as well as the family and community environments in which they live, were collected from three sources: their parents, their teachers, and from the children themselves.

This research report is one of five community research report's describing children's outcomes and explaining them in terms of three factors: family background, family processes, and community factors. children's outcomes were assessed in three major categories: physical health and well-being, cognitive skills, and behavioural measures.

The data for all five community research report's were based on the National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth (NLSCY) and the Early Development Instrument (EDI) assessments. This means that the samples drawn in each of the first five communities were based on families with children ages 5 and 6 who were given both of the NLSCY and EDI assessments.

In order to understand the performance of the children in this community based on the EDI, the results are compared to a larger EDI sample of about 28, 250 children, drawn from selected communities. Although this sample - referred to as EDI-16, is not truly national or representative, it provides a means of comparing children in this community with other 5-6 year old children. The numbers of EDI-16, are different from those used in the EDI monitoring report.¹

The results from the NLSCY assessments taken by the community children are compared with the national means, developed from the national survey, which has a nationally representative sample.

There is increasing evidence to support the importance of investing in the early years in children's development. New research shows that these formative years are critical, and that the kind of nurturing and stimulation that children receive in their early years can have a major impact on the rest of their lives.

Evidence also suggests that neighbourhoods and communities where children grow and learn directly influence their development. They affect parents ability to provide the best possible family environment, and the ability of schools to offer the best possible education.

Neighbourhoods, communities, provinces, and regions across Canada differ in important ways. Therefore, gathering community-specific information about children and the places where they are raised can help the policy sector² deliver programs that are sensitive and responsive to local conditions. Understanding the Early Years can contribute to this process.

Figure 1.1 - The Southwestern Newfoundland Community

This research report provides baseline information about kindergarten children in Southwestern Newfoundland. Figure 1.1 shows the geographic area where the children and families sampled in this study live.

The first aim of this report is to assess how children fare in their learning and behavioural outcomes and in their physical health and well-being. It considers children's developmental outcomes shortly after they begin kindergarten. Where possible, the report provides provincial- and national-level information with which local conditions can be compared.

The report's second aim is to discern how important certain family and community factors are in affecting children's development, as well as to provide some indication of what actions might further improve children's outcomes in this community.

The report sets out ten indicators upon which this community can act over the next few years. If the policy sector can devise ways of improving the processes associated with these empirically based indicators, it is likely that children's outcomes during the formative years will improve as will their chances of leading healthy and fulfilling lives.

B. How the study was conducted

The information contained in this document was collected and analyzed using a variety of methods.

Two major types of information about the children were collected. The first considers their "readiness to learn", which comprises five major developmental domains:

• Physical health and well-being
• Social competence
• Emotional maturity
• Language and cognitive development
• Communication skills and general knowledge

Information for this set of domains was collected by teachers, using a checklist called the Early Development Instrument (EDI) developed by Dr. Dan Offord and Dr. Magdalena Janus at the Canadian Centre for Studies of Children at Risk, McMaster University. Teachers of all kindergarten children attending English language and French Immersion public schools in the community were asked to complete the checklist about the behaviours and development of each child in their class. This information was used to determine how ready the community's children, as a whole, were for school.

The second type of developmental information was collected through a survey of parents, guardians, and the children themselves. The instruments used in the National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth Community Study were administered to children and their parents. This was done to acquire more detailed information about the experiences of children and families in Southwestern Newfoundland, as well as, measures of children's outcomes regarding their cognitive skills, pro-social and behaviour outcomes. In addition, information regarding childcare arrangements (e.g., whether children were cared for by parents, relatives, or non-relatives, either at home or outside the home) was collected.

A random sample of 289 kindergarten children from Southwestern Newfoundland was selected to participate in this survey. Statistics Canada interviewers collected detailed information from and about these children using instruments from the NLSCY

Community Study. The major instruments measuring children's outcomes include:

• Vocabulary skills (Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test, Revised) - Test of receptive vocabulary administered to each child.
• Developmental Level (Who Am I?) - Test of early literacy administered to each child.
• Number knowledge (Number Knowledge Assessment) - administered to each child.
• Behaviour Outcomes - determined by in-depth telephone interviews with the person most knowledgeable, usually the mother.

The interviewers also collected information about several family and community factors that can help explain the patterns of child development in the community.

Children completed assessments that asked them to draw, print symbols, (e.g., letters and words), show their understanding of quantity and number sequence, and match pictures to words that they heard. Their families provided information about their social and economic backgrounds, their children's activities and involvement in the community, their health, and their social, emotional, and behavioural development.

Because the NLSCY questionnaire is also used across the country as a national survey, the outcomes for children in this community can be compared with national data.

C. Why the study is of interest

Understanding the Early Years combines information about children with information about their families and the communities in which they live. This, in turn, provides an understanding of the relationship between children's outcomes and the environments in which they are raised. This is important for Canada's parents and communities who want to help their children develop well. Second, it helps the individuals, institutions, and communities who work with children to understand these processes at the levels where action is often most effective, the neighborhood and community.

This report highlights some of the key findings from the information that was collected from teachers, parents, and their children. It examines the overall development of children in kindergarten (through the Early Development Instrument) and provides a more detailed look at the outcomes of these children (through the NLSCY Community Study). It suggests some of the unique strengths from which Southwestern Newfoundland can work, and some challenges to overcome in continuing to build a collective commitment to ensure the health, well-being, and positive development of its young children.

D. Socio-economic status in study area

Socio-economic status (SES) is an important variable in social research because it affects a persons "chances for education, income, occupation, marriage, health, friends, and even life expectancy."³ This report describes children's outcomes and how they are affected by family socio-economic status, family processes, and community resources. Thus, it is helpful to have an understanding of the socio-economic backgrounds of the families in this community, as well as how these are distributed geographically across the study area. Socio-economic status is usually quantified as a composite measure comprising income, level of education, and occupational status. Accordingly, the measure of SES used here combines the income, level of education, and occupational status of the children's parents. Other family factors, such as family structure (e.g., single- vs. two-parent family), or whether the mother was a teenager when the child was born, are not dimensions of SES (although they are usually correlated with SES). Additional aspects of family and community structure will be presented in Section III.

Figure 1.2 shows the distribution of socioeconomic status of Southwestern Newfoundland. The figure clearly shows that this community has a relatively low socioeconomic status, compared with other areas of Canada. Many of the enumeration areas in Southwestern Newfoundland (EAs) have SES scores below -1, and all but one of the other EAs have scores below the national average (shown in orange or red). The disparities in socio-economic status will also be apparent in the results presented in Section III, which describe the family background characteristics of the children and families sampled in this study.

Despite the relatively low socio-economic status of this community, the children of Southwestern Newfoundland scored higher than the national averages for most outcomes measured with the EDI and the NLSCY instruments. Moreover, the spatial distribution of outcomes does not match SES patterns, indicating that there are many children in poor areas who are faring quite well.

Inset 1 - Socio-economic Status
The measure of socio-economic status (SES) for the map in Figure 1.2 was derived from the 1996 Canadian Census, based on data describing enumeration areas (EAs), which represent a geographic unit of about 400 families. The measure of SES is a composite score derived from census measures of family income, level of education, and the occupational status of adults living within each enumeration area. The composite scores were standardized, such that the average score for all EAs in Canada was zero, and the standard deviation was one. With this standardization, only about one in six EAs scored below -1 (low SES shown in dark red), and about one in six scored above +1 (high SES shown in dark green) in Southwestern Newfoundland.

Figure 1.2 - Socioeconomic Status of the Southwestern Newfoundland community

• ¹The EDI community monitoring report uses only EDI data. Whereas, the EDI data in this report are based on only those children and parents who completed the NLSCY community study as well as the EDI. In other words, to be included in the EDI sample for this report, children and their parents also completed the NLSCY Community Study, subsequently, the numbers in the EDI report and the research report will not be the same.
• ²Policy sector is broadly conceived to include families, the private and voluntary sectors, and governments at local, provincial and federal levels.
• ³Miller, Delbert C. 1991. Handbook of Research Design and Social Measurement. Sage Publications, Inc. Newbury Park, CA. p. 327.

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