Effects of Child–Caregiver Ratio on the Interactions Between Caregivers and Children in Child-Care Centers: An Experimental Study

Abstract

To investigate the effects of child-caregiver ratio on the quality of caregiver-child interaction in child-care centers, 217 caregivers (ages 18-56 years) from 64 child care centers were observed during two structured play episodes: one with a group of three children and one with a group of 5 children. As predicted, a child-caregiver ratio of 3:1 produced a significantly higher quality of caregiver-child interaction than a ratio of 5:1 and particularly for younger children. Significant and meaningful effects were found for both the interactive behaviors of the caregivers and the children's well-being and cooperation. Significant correlations with caregiver-child interaction during lunchtime and throughout the remainder of the morning confirmed the ecological validity of the caregiver-child interactions observed during structured play episodes.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 171 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.