An indicatorbased monitoring of structural quality in the German early childhood education and care system (ERiK)

The ERiK Children and Parents Survey was conducted in spring and summer 2022 during the pandemic. For the first time, a nationwide survey was conducted to determine how children aged four and over perceive selected quality aspects of day care. The aim was to let the children speak for themselves in order to find out more about their everyday life and their perspectives in relation to the daycare centre. For this purpose, 490 children were interviewed personally at the centre using a child-friendly and playful method. In addition, the subjective view of parents on child day care was taken into account.

Facilities were randomly selected from the daycare centres that had already participated in the 2020 ERiK surveys and invited to take part in the child and parent survey. The study was then conducted in these centres as follows:

• Firstly, the respective centre management answered a short questionnaire to provide information about the respective daycare centre. The centre management then distributed invitations to participate in the study to all parents of children aged 4 and over who were not yet attending school.
• The invited parents answered a parental questionnaire online. As part of this, they gave their consent as to whether their own child could take part in the survey.
• A trained interviewer then came to the centre to interview the children in person. She first organised a "warm-up phase" with the participating children, during which the children had the opportunity to get to know the interviewer in a familiar environment. The children were then interviewed individually, one after the other, with the help of a board game. The children were able to stop the interview at any time.

Selected results of the child survey can be found here. Further materials on the background to the study, the process of the child and parent survey, an overview of the respective survey content, information on how the results were used and information on data protection can be found at erik@dji.de.

The centres were contacted by post for the survey in cooperation with infas Institute for Applied Social Sciences. The parents completed an online questionnaire and the children were asked about their impressions in a computer-assisted personal interview (CAPI) at the daycare centre. You can view the respective questionnaires under the following links:

• Questions for the facilities
• Questions for the parents
• Questions for the children 

Access to children as interview subjects and informed consent must be planned and carried out with particular care in the case of child surveys. In the ERiK study, access to the children surveyed was via daycare centres that had already taken part in the ERiK Surveys 2020. It was important to inform the parents about the survey and to obtain consent to participate in the study from the children's parents. The latter again presented a difficulty, as the parents ultimately decided for the children whether they were allowed to take part in the survey.

Attention must also be paid to uncertainties regarding children's self-disclosures. Above all, there was great heterogeneity in the linguistic communication in the survey group, which could become apparent as a difficulty in standardisation. We trained the interviewers on this topic by drawing their attention to this problem and allowing them to repeat the questions several times if necessary. To check whether the children understood the questions, test questions were asked at the beginning of the survey, which the children were able to answer well. The children also benefited from the smiley and circle scales we developed and used, which they could often point to when answering a question. Finally, we asked the interviewers about difficulties during the interview and only just under 5% of the children interviewed reported language difficulties during the interview.

The relationship between the adult interviewer and the child also represents a relationship of authority that can potentially lead to inhibitions or social desirability. To this end, we trained the interviewers intensively in advance so that they were sensitive to this relationship of authority and paid particular attention to treating the children as equals during the interview.

Special consideration was also given to data protection and anonymisation in the case of children. On the one hand, we complied with this by not collecting any sensitive data from the children, but only their views on certain aspects of their daycare centre. On the other hand, all information was treated confidentially and anonymously, which means that conclusions about individual children or their daycare centres are impossible.

In conclusion, our experience has shown that the children enjoyed the survey and were proud to be taken seriously and listened to as experts on the world in which they live.