Indicators of family care for development are essential for
ascertaining whether families are providing their children with an
environment that leads to positive developmental outcomes. This project
aimed to develop indicators from a set of items, measuring family care
practices and resources important for caregiving, for use in
epidemiologic surveys in developing countries. A mixed method
(quantitative and qualitative) design was used for item selection and
evaluation. Qualitative and quantitative analyses were conducted to
examine the validity of candidate items in several country samples.
Qualitative methods included the use of global expert panels to
identify and evaluate the performance of each candidate item as well as
in-country focus groups to test the content validity of the items. The
quantitative methods included analyses of item-response distributions,
using bivariate techniques. The selected items measured two family care
practices (support for learning/stimulating environment and
limit-setting techniques) and caregiving resources (adequacy of the
alternate caregiver when the mother worked). Six play-activity items,
indicative of support for learning/stimulating environment, were
included in the core module of UNICEF’s Multiple Cluster Indictor
Survey 3. The other items were included in optional modules. This
project provided, for the first time, a globally-relevant set of items
for assessing family care practices and resources in epidemiological
surveys. These items have multiple uses, including national monitoring
and cross-country comparisons of the status of family care for
development used globally. The obtained information will reinforce
attention to efforts to improve the support for development of
children