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Child Questionnaire

RESPONDENT:	MODE OF ADMINISTRATION:	MAIN OBJECTIVE:
Child, 3-12 years old	Face to Face ONLY	To obtain information on the cognitive and social ability of children in the specified age range.

Key Objectives of the Questionnaire:
To obtain information on...

• Children's reading and math ability.
• Children's memory.
• Children's self-esteem as it relates to school subjects and to their general lives.
• Children's day at school, middle-school children.

For the most part this study uses existing measures to assess children and their families. These measures are summarized in Chapter 6. Children's well-being is defined in terms of cognitive/academic, socioemotional, and physical development (Brooks-Gunn, 1990; McCormick & Brooks-Gunn, 1989). Three basic types of outcomes linked to children's well-being and future success were measured. These are:

1. School progress, academic achievement and cognitive ability, including grade failure/progression, highest grade completed, verbal and math ability and literacy.
2. Socioemotional well-being, through the behavior problems and positive behavior scales, and
3. Health.

Primary Caregiver Questionnaire (Child and Household)

Child Booklet

RESPONDENT:	MODE OF ADMINISTRATION:	MAIN OBJECTIVE:
Mother/Primary Caregiver	Face to Face (Preferred)/Phone (Optional)	To obtain information about the health, behavior, education, and general environment of the child.

Key Objectives of the Questionnaire:
To obtain information on...

• Mother/primary caregivers literacy.
• Children's health history.
• Home environment.
• Children's schooling.
• Children's behavior.
• Household tasks.
• Parental involvement in school.
• Parental monitoring of children's activities and friends.
• Child care history.
• Relationship with absent parent (if applicable).
• Food availability in the home.

Household Booklet

RESPONDENT:	MODE OF ADMINISTRATION:	MAIN OBJECTIVE:
Mother/Primary Caregiver	Self-Administered/Phone or Face to Face (Literacy and Language Problems)	To obtain information on the neighborhood, household, and parental environment of the child.

Key Objectives of the Questionnaire:
To obtain information on...

• Characteristics of the family's neighborhood.
• Social support for the mother/primary caregiver.
• Distribution of household tasks.
• Attitudes on child rearing.
• Parenting.
• Attitudes on gender roles in the household.
• Psychological well-being.
• Family conflict.
• Work schedules.

Assessments
Like the target child, the Primary Caregiver is also assessed using the Woodcock-Johnson Revised Tests of Achievement (WJ-R), Form B. The Primary Caregiver, however, was only administered one sub-scale, the passage comprehension subtest. The purpose of this test was to assess the Primary Caregiver's educational attainment. The Spanish version of the WJ-R (Batería-R, Form A) was used for Primary Caregivers whose first language was Spanish.

Other Caregiver Questionnaire (Child and Household)

Child Booklet

RESPONDENT:	MODE OF ADMINISTRATION:	MAIN OBJECTIVE:
Father, Grandmother, Boyfriend/Girlfriend, Other Relative	Self-Administered	To obtain information on the behavior and general environment of the child from the perspective of the other caregiver in the home.

Key Objectives of the Questionnaire: To obtain information on...

• Children's schooling.
• Children's behavior.
• Household tasks.
• Other caregiver involvement in school.
• Other caregiver monitoring of children's activities and friends.

Household Booklet

RESPONDENT:	MODE OF ADMINISTRATION:	MAIN OBJECTIVE:
Father, Grandmother, Boyfriend/Girlfriend, Other Relative	Self-Administered	To obtain information on household and parental environment of the child from the perspective of the other caregiver in the home.

Key Objectives of the Questionnaire:
To obtain information on...

• Distribution of household tasks.
• Attitudes on child rearing.
• Parenting.
• Aattitudes on gender roles in the household.
• Psychological well-being.
• Family conflict.
• Work schedules.

Fathers Who Live Outside of the Home of the Target Child Questionnaire

Child Booklet

RESPONDENT:	MODE OF ADMINISTRATION:	MAIN OBJECTIVE:	NOTES
Father absent from the target child's home	Phone Administration	To obtain information on the behavior and interaction of the child with the absent father.	Must be given father information from Primary Caregiver. Tracking is limited to one Directory Assistance call.

Key Objectives of the Questionnaire:
To obtain information on...

• Parental conflict.
• Children's schooling.
• Children's behavior.
• Household tasks.
• Parental involvement in school.
• Parental monitoring of children's activities and friends.

Household Booklet

RESPONDENT:	MODE OF ADMINISTRATION:	MAIN OBJECTIVE:	NOTES & RULES
Father absent from the target child's home.	Phone Administration	To obtain information on the absent father household and the parental environment of the child.	Must be given father information from Primary Caregiver. Tracking is limited to one Directory Assistance call.

Key Objectives of the Questionnaire:
To obtain information on...

• Attitudes on child rearing.
• Parenting.
• Attitudes on gender roles in the household.
• Psychological well-being.
• Work schedules.

Time Diaries
Assessment of parent-child interaction often rests largely on reports of children's time use. There are several ways of assessing how much time and in what activities parents and children engage. The most accurate way to collect such data would be through observation. However, such methods are costly, intrusive, and limited in the amount of a day that can be covered. Another accurate way to collect information is by time sampling, in which respondents write down the activity they are engaged in whenever a beeper sounds. This methodology is also costly, intrusive and limited. The most common method in survey research is to ask parents directly how much time they spend in certain activities, such as reading to their child. While simple and widely used, this method is known to be biased. First, it is subject to social desirability bias. Parents will report more time spent on desirable activities (such as reading) than on less desirable ones. Second, there is no baseline against which to check consistency, validity, or reliability. Thus times have been shown to be quite inaccurately reported (Juster & Stafford, 1985). In contrast, substantial methodological work has established the validity and reliability of data collected in time-diary form (Juster & Stafford, 1985). The instrument for assessing time use is a "time diary," which is a chronological report by the child and/or the child's primary caretaker about the child's activities over a specified recent 24-hour period, beginning at midnight (who the reporter is depends on the age of the child). The time diary is interviewer-administered and asks several questions about the child's flow of activities, such as what they were doing at that time, when the activity began and ended, and what else they were doing (if they were engaged in multiple activities). The Child Development Supplement to the Panel Study of Income Dynamics also added two questions: "Who was (child) doing that with?" and "Who else was there?" These added questions, when linked to activity codes such as playing or being read to, provide unbiased details on the extent of parent/child one-on-one interactions and availability of the parents. The advantage of such questions is that total time in one day has to add to 24 hours. Consequently, while individual times may be slightly inaccurate, the times are consistent with one another. The disadvantage of the time diary is that it represents only a sample of children's days. Thus while it accurately represents the activities of a sample of children on a given day, it is only a very small sample of a given child's days and, as such, has limited reliability. To improve reliability, most time-use studies obtain at least one weekend and one weekday and many also obtain multiple samples over a period of time, such as a year.

Since the data collection format is open-ended--an advantage for avoiding biases toward "good" activities and away from "bad" activities but a potential pitfall for proper interpretation of the data--precise, clear, and well-focused definitions of activities are vital. Fortunately, the 1975-1981 Time Use Study has paved the way in guidelines for coding children's time-diary reports (Juster & Stafford, 1985). Working with several child development experts and other time-use experts from many disciplines and representing a wide range of countries and cultures, Hill, Stafford, Juster, and colleagues in the 1981 follow-up of the 1975-1981 Time Use Study spent considerable time and effort designing a time-use methodology appropriate to children. The methodology is not onerous. Researchers have found that parents of young children enjoy working with their youngsters to provide the children's time diaries, which take about 15 minutes per child per day, and can adequately represent the child's day (Timmer et al., 1985).

Child Time Diary

RESPONDENT:	MODE OF ADMINISTRATION:	MAIN OBJECTIVE:	NOTES
Primary Caregiver or Primary Caregiver with Child	Mail Ahead w/Face to Face Editing (Preferred)/Mail Ahead w/Phone Interview (Optional)	To obtain information on the time-use of children during a weekday and weekend day.	Diary completes a 24-hour day.

Key Objectives of the Questionnaire:
To obtain information on...

• Activities during children's days.
• Who interacts with children during weekdays and weekend days.
• How many activities children participate in on a daily basis.

Elementary School Time Diaries

RESPONDENT:	MODE OF ADMINISTRATION:	MAIN OBJECTIVE:
Child	Face to Face	Older school-age children who changed classes during the day and, therefore, had several teachers were asked to fill out the School Time Diary themselves, See Child Questionnaire, p. 36.

School Questionnaires
Elementary (Teacher and Administrator)

Key Objectives of the Questionnaire:
To obtain information on...

• School environment.
• Language ability of the target child.
• Background and experience of the teachers.

Key Objectives of the Questionnaire:
To obtain information on...

• Geographic location of school.
• Racial composition of the school.
• Characteristics of the school.

Preschool (Teacher and Administrator)

Key Objectives of the Questionnaire:
To obtain information on...

• School/center environment.
• Language ability of the target child.
• Background and experience of the teachers/caregivers.
• Time-use data on the teacher and target child.

Key Objectives of the Questionnaire:
To obtain information on...

• Geographic location of school/center.
• Racial composition of the school/center.
• Characteristics of the school/center.

Home-based Care (Teacher and Administrator)

Key Objectives of the Questionnaire:
To obtain information on...

• Environment of home-based care.
• Services of home-base care.
• Background and experience of the caregivers.
• Time-use data on the caregiver and target child.