Understanding the Early Years An Update of Early Childhood Development Results in Four Canadian Communities - July 2005
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Executive Summary
Understanding the Early Years (UEY) is a national research initiative. It provides communities with information to enable them to make informed decisions about the best policies and most appropriate programs for families with young children. It seeks to provide information about the influence of community factors on children’s early development and to improve the community’s capacity to use these data in monitoring child development and creating effective community-based responses.
Studies in one pilot community and twelve study communities were conducted between 2000 and 2002. This report is an update of the findings for four of the communities that began UEY in 2000-01.
Data for these reports were derived from teacher assessments, telephone interviews with parents, and direct assessments of the children at school. Each assessment is comprised of several measures:
- Family background, which includes information on the parents’ income, level of education, and occupational status.
- Family processes, which include parenting practices, engagement in learning activities, family functioning, and maternal mental health.
- Community factors, which include social support, neighbourhood safety and social capital, and the use of recreational, cultural, and educational resources.
- Children’s outcomes, which are assessed in three ways: kindergarten teachers’ assessments of children’s outcomes, direct assessments of children’s receptive vocabulary and a more global assessment of their development, parents’ assessments of children’s behaviour.
Where possible, the outcomes of the children in these communities were compared with the Canadian averages. Also, the data collected from the UEY sites allow for comparisons of outcomes between 2000 and 2004 for the four UEY communities in this study. However, this is not the primary purpose of this report, as in many cases the sample sizes are too small for accurately measuring change at the community level. Also, many of the initiatives put in place by the communities are not likely to realize their benefits in a four-year period.
Valuable lessons have been learned from the UEY initiative about the needs and strengths of communities with different economic, social, and physical characteristics, and about how they are each working to improve their young children’s outcomes. This community-based research is important because it allows a community to understand how well its youngest citizens are developing and lends insight into which factors contribute to success and warrant further consideration.
Overall, the Understanding the Early Years initiative has been remarkably successful in promoting the importance of early childhood development in the communities that pioneered this initiative. The findings of this follow-up study indicate that family income, parental education and employment are important determinants of early childhood outcomes. However, there are other important determinants of positive outcomes that can be more easily changed through the efforts of families and other community members. These include approaches to parenting, engagement in learning activities, the family’s use of available resources, neighbourhood social capital, and social support.
The findings also suggest that it is very difficult to measure changes at the community level, in both the family and community determinants of early childhood outcomes and in the outcomes themselves. One problem is that the accurate measurement of a construct often requires lengthy tests or interview schedules. UEY measures a broad range of constructs, and to measure all of these well would require very lengthy interviews and testing sessions. Another problem is that the sample size of children in many communities is too small to yield estimates that are accurate enough for assessing change. The reliable measurement of change at the community level will require frequent direct assessments of children, and stronger research designs. Given this limitation, the UEY measurement process should be viewed as an important infrastructure upon which other local measurement initiatives can be built. Used in this way, it can provide an opportunity for applied research within communities that examines the effects of specific interventions and policies.
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