Development of a WHO Child Care Facility Schedule (CCFS): a pilot collaborative study

Area of Science:

• Child development
• Pediatric care quality assessment
• Public health research methodology

Background:

• Assessing the quality of child-care settings is crucial for child development and well-being.
• Existing methods for quality assessment may lack standardization or reliability.
• A need exists for a validated, reliable tool to evaluate child-care environments.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop and evaluate a questionnaire method for assessing quality in child-care settings.
• To establish the inter-rater reliability of the developed assessment tool.
• To refine the tool based on reliability study findings for improved usability and accuracy.

Main Methods:

• Development of the Child Care Facility Schedule (CCFS) by a WHO collaborative study group.
• An inter-rater reliability study conducted in Greece and Nigeria using the 80-item CCFS.
• Modifications to items, scoring, instructions, and interviewing techniques based on reliability results.

Main Results:

• The Child Care Facility Schedule (CCFS) demonstrated satisfactory inter-rater reliability.
• Refinements to specific items, the scoring system, and user manual instructions improved the tool's performance.
• Adjustments in interviewing techniques further enhanced the reliability of the assessment.

Conclusions:

• The modified Child Care Facility Schedule (CCFS) provides a reliable system for rating child-care quality.
• Further validity studies are underway to confirm the tool's overall usefulness in diverse settings.
• The developed method offers a valuable contribution to standardized child-care quality assessment globally.