This site communicates family-centered, distance-based measures of access to child care services. Points on the map represent the spatial distribution of residences of families with at least one young child (under 5 years old). These are not true locations of actual family residences. The points represent "synthetic family" locations. The spatial distribution of these points represents the estimated spatial distribution of families with young children based on data from the U.S. Census's 2010 decennial Census and the 2011-2015 American Community Survey drawing from:
Ruggles, Genadek, Goeken, Grover, and Sobek. Integrated Public Use Microdata Series: Version 7.0 [dataset]. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2017. https://doi.org/10.18128/D010.V7.0.
Steven Manson, Jonathan Schroeder, David Van Riper, and Steven Ruggles. IPUMS National Historical Geographic Information System: Version 12.0 [Database]. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota. 2017. http://doi.org/10.18128/D050.V12.0
Information about families is also encoded and represented in the synthetic family locations. Each point represents about four Minnesota families with at least one young child. The average number of young children per family in the 2010 Census block is used. Census information about the ethnic and racial distribution of families with young children is also encoded and represented in the synthetic families.
Demand-adjusted supply measures the quantity of care available nearby each synthetic family's location. For each family location, this measure is increasing in the number of nearby providers, their proximity, and their capacity and decreasing in the number of young children living near those providers. More specifically, in order to adjust supply for local potential demand, the licensed capacity of each provider is divided through by the number of young children living nearby, yielding a provider-specific demand-adjusted capacity. To measure demand-adjusted supply for each family, demand-adjusted capacities for all providers nearby the family's location are summed. In these measures, "nearby" means within a twenty-minute drive and distance weighting with a Gaussian kernel using beta parameter equal to 4.
High-rated supply [demand-adjusted] measures the quantity of highly-rated care available nearby each synthetic family's location. It is the same as demand-adjust supply except restricted only to highly-rated providers where highly-rated is 3- or 4-star rated in the Parent Aware quality rating and improvement system.
High-rated share measures the share of demand-adjusted supply that is high-rated. For each family, it is simply the ratio of high-rated supply [demand-adjusted] to demand-adjusted supply. When none (all) of the supply is high-rated, it takes the value 0 (1).
Total cost measures a family's cost of accessing full-time care for a preschooler at nearby providers accounting for both the weekly money price charged by the provider plus the cost of required travel time. For any synthetic family and provider pair, the cost of travel time is the travel time between the family's and the provider's location times 10 trips per week times $10 per hour. For each family-provider pair, the money price and travel cost are summed to get a total cost of access for that family at that provider. For each family, the reported total cost measure is the average total cost at all nearby providers using each nearby provider's demand-adjusted capacity as a weight in computing the total cost average.