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Challenges of Building a Sampling Frame and Sampling in a National Survey of Institutions Providing Child Care and Early Education Services

Keywords: sampling frame, sampling method, National Survey of Early Care and Education

The National Survey of Early Care and Education (NSECE) is an integrated set of surveys with households with young children, institutions and individuals providing care for young children. The NSECE assembles the first national portrait of the demand for and supply of early child care and education in twenty years. Central to the NSECE is the interview of institutions and individuals providing early care and education to children under the age of 13. Currently there is no one comprehensive list of all institutions offering such care and education services. Thus, a sampling frame has to be created by pulling from multiple administrative lists. This paper will describe the approach taken for the NSECE and discuss the challenges of taking information from multiple administrative lists and combining them into one deduplicated complete list.

Because of significant interactions between segments of early care and education, this paper will also discuss the challenges in sampling different segments of institutions to ensure sufficient representation of certain segments while taking into full consideration the complex embedding and collocating issues common to child care institutions.