February 16, 2012

It depends on what you ask

This table is from a US Census Bureau report  Who’s Minding the Kids? Child Care Arrangements:Spring 2005/Summer 2006.  The report in general is boring and informative, but Table 1 stands out: why are nearly four times as many pre-schoolers cared for by fathers vs mothers!?

It turns out that there is an explanation, but it shows how interpretation of statistical output depends on exactly what you ask.  The Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) samples a ‘designated parent’ for each child, and if both mother and father are available they always choose the mother.  The child-care arrangement data are for child care by someone other than the designated parent, so ‘care by the mother’ means ‘care by the mother when the child lives with the father’.  As you would expect, some fathers don’t like this, and neither do some mothers, and it does seem a bit twentieth-century.

In partial defense of the Census Bureau, they have good reasons for being very reluctant to change their questions, because they are often interested in trends over time.  And Table 2 of the report does break down care arrangments by who the child lives with, and by employment information, and other factors.

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Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »

Comments

  • avatar
    Rachel Cunliffe

    Thanks Thomas, that’s fascinating!

    Are there any other questions which you can think of which fall into this category of keeping in line with historical norms even though it seems rather outdated today?

    12 years ago