IL Childcare and Children’s Health Survey

Ensuring policies and programs meant to support children under the age of 5 achieve their goals requires detailed, comprehensive data on the environments in which they live. However, data on the social and physical environments where children spend time (e.g., homes and daycares) for Illinois are limited. Therefore, we propose development of a registry and multi-wave survey to collect timely data from those who care for children (i.e., parents and childcare providers), including their demographics and socioeconomic status, caregiving experiences, and perceptions of the social, physical, and built environment. These data will be responsive to the current shifts in childcare policy in Illinois and will fill important gaps in our understanding of the conditions of childcare spaces across the state. During this first year, we will pilot ways to integrate our registry with others and allow for seamless data sharing. We will also establish protocols by which investigators can access data and contribute to the development of future survey modules. To ensure our data have widespread reach, we will develop a public-facing data dashboard where users will be able to obtain deidentified data sets and aggregate data reports. The results from our first survey wave will be disseminated widely in a number of ways, including summary reports and fact sheets for registry participants, IGPA policy spotlights, and the peer-reviewed literature.