DJI Childcare Study (KiBS) 2016-2018

The BMFSFJ considers good childcare and early support for all children to be among the most important future tasks in Germany. In this context, the creation of demand-oriented childcare offers is an important prerequisite for enabling young families to reconcile family and work.

Beside the information about the quantitative expansion of childcare facilities, which is based on official statistics, it is primarily the wishes of parents that provide information on the extent to which the current childcare offers meet the actual demands. These parental demands or wishes are the subject of the DJI Childcare Study (KiBS).

The study follows on from the DJI-KiföG study conducted from 2012 to 2015, which examined the childcare demand and current childcare situation of children under three years of age at state and federal level from the parents' perspective. KiBS goes beyond its predecessor study by also focusing on older children for the first time.

The expansion of the age range among the target children is particularly important and innovative in light of the fact that schoolchildren are not yet legally entitled to a childcare place. The parent survey can be used to examine which parents are successful in their search for a childcare place and assert themselves. This is all the more true since the need for care does not disappear all at once when children transition to school, but continues. So far, the coverage of care needs, due to the legal entitlement there, is on relatively safe ground only for non-school children (U3 children and U6 children).

The study deals with the care of children under the age of 15 or 12 years from the perspective of parents. The following topics will be researched:

• Childcare situation and demand, including informal care arrangements comprising, e.g., grandparents or siblings
• Satisfaction with the offer used
• Expectations regarding the quality of care and the evaluation of its implementation
• Reasons for nonuse of institutional care
• Difficulties with the organization of childcare
• Compatibility of family and work
• Regional contexts and differences in childcare utilization

The DJI Childcare Study (KiBS) has been conducted since 2016 as a federal-state-representative survey of approx. 35,000 parents of children under the age of 15 (2016/2017) and 29,000 under the age of 12 (from 2018). Based on samples taken from the residents' registration offices about 2,300 interviews are conducted per federal state. This means that the same number of parents are interviewed in each federal state, regardless of its size. In this process, the youngest age cohort, children under one year of age, is redrawn annually, while older children continue the panel survey. Unmet caseloads in panel cases are filled by so-called refresher cases.

All interviews are conducted as proxy interviews with the parent primary caring for the child (the child's mother in over 90 percent of cases). The survey duration is about 20 minutes per person for a telephone interview (CATI).

Kindertagesbetreuung Kompakt (Child Day Care Compact):

• Kindertagesbetreuung Kompakt (Issue 03)
• Kindertagesbetreuung Kompakt (Issue 02)
• Kindertagesbetreuung Kompakt (Issue 01)

Other publications:

• Wer nutzt die Ganztagsangebote in der Grundschule? (Who uses all-day offerings in primary school?) (Working Paper – Weighting)
  Associated WEB tables (Excel format) *download link*
• Gleiche Chancen durch frühe Bildung (Equal opportunities through early education)

Interactive maps: fruehe-chancen.de