K²ID-SOEP extension study

The SOEP-K2ID project aims at: investigating effects of ECEC quality on children’s socio-emotional development, examining socio-economic selectivity in parental choices of ECEC quality, assessing information asymmetries between mothers and ECEC providers, exploring how ECEC quality affects maternal employment and wellbeing and indirectly child development. The three-year project launched in September 2013 is funded by the Jacobs Foundation. The project collected new data on the quality of ECEC institutions, that children below school age in Socio-Economic Panel Study attend. In a first step, the project surveyed parents of all SOEP children below school age to investigate the parental decision-making process and subjective evaluations with respect to ECEC quality of the institutions attended by their children. In a second step, the project collected indicators of structural, orientation and process quality from directors and class teachers of the ECEC institutions to capture the quality of interactions between children and teaching staff, activities, learning environment, and teacher orientations. By combining institutional information on the educational context with individual and household data collected in the SOEP, this new data set will allow researchers to examine associations with children’s development first during early childhood and school years and subsequently until adulthood.