7/1/2022 – 6/30/2023
$75,000
The RAPID Survey Project is a program of national and place-based surveys designed to gather essential information on the experiences, well-being, resiliency and needs of young children and the adults who care for them. The project is led by Dr. Phil Fisher and a team at the Stanford Center on Early Childhood and guided by a National Advisory Council of experts in early childhood practice, research, advocacy, philanthropy, and social sciences communication. RAPID’s objectives are to make timely and actionable data available in an ongoing manner to support data- and caregiver-informed policies and programs.
Each month, RAPID successfully fielded two brief initial recruitment surveys, one to households with at least one child under age 6 and another to members of the early care and educator workforce. In this way, we continued to draw in new perspectives and experiences from parents of young children and early educators across the country. Additionally, we fielded two monthly ongoing surveys to a sample of households with young children and to early educators, which enabled us to track trends over time in certain domains (e.g., material hardship, adult well-being) and to introduce new modules into the survey to gather information and voices on timely and relevant topics. Overall, during the grant period, we successfully fielded 60 surveys and, with each, we completed a cycle of research activities including building the survey instrument, distributing the links to
recruitment partners, collecting data, and processing, managing, and analyzing the data.
We aim to expand national recruitment partnerships to organizations that interact specifically with Black, Asian, Alaska Native/American Indian, Latine, and other racial and ethnic groups that have been historically underrepresented in early childhood research. In this way, we can improve the diversity of the RAPID samples and therefore the representation of diverse experiences in the data and the relevance of the data and findings
among our partners, researchers, and stakeholders broadly. Ultimately our aim is for RAPID data to be a resource in promoting racial equity in early childhood policies and programs. In this project, we focused on developing and maintaining meaningful partnerships with Abriendo Puertas/Opening Doors and the RISER Network. Overall, we were able to gather 165 survey responses from 117 parents of children served by Educare sites, and we are very optimistic about the potential to continue this partnership going forward. In partnership
with RISER, we also supported with data collection and analysis of a new set of questions designed to capture caregivers’ experiences of Cultural Wealth and continued to collaborate on analysis and manuscript development for peer-reviewed articles. Through focused partnership development with Abriendo Puertas, we gathered information from 2,047 parents, 52% of whom identified as Black, Latine, Asian, American Indian/Alaskan Native or another race or ethnicity. Similarly, we gathered information from 307 child care providers, 30% of whom identified as Black, Latine, Asian, American Indian/Alaskan Native or another race or ethnicity. Adding these experiences, perspectives and voices to the RAPID datasets strengthens the relevancy and representativeness of data for all users and stakeholders.