Childcare Professionals: A Case Study

To begin, the population of interest is childcare professionals such as teacher’s assistants or lead teachers who work in daycare centers. They are a group of low-wage workers and therefore, more likely to experience chronic stress. There are 1.3 million childcare workers in the United States, a third of whom are women of color. Childcare professionals make about $8.87 per hour, which is about half the living wage in North Carolina. Being a member of several vulnerable populations, specifically being a woman, a person of color, and having a low SES, increase their risk of poor health outcomes. Most do not receive job-related benefits such as health insurance. Research shows they have a higher risk of infectious disease, however, no research examines how their
Paper surveys, which assess several measurements of stress and health behavior, were dropped off at the childcare centers. The original study was designed as a mixed methods study, meaning collecting quantitative and qualitative data, to examine the relationship between chronic stress and health risk factors. My interest in this project is on understanding the prevalence of financial hardship, economic problems, and smoking in this group since there is no literature on the perceptions of childcare professionals’ economic status and their chronic disease risk. In order for me to pursue my research question, I conducted literature reviews discussing financial hardship and its impact on smoking. I served as the data manager which includes assisting with primary data collection, creating a data entry database, and data cleaning and analysis. For the quantitative data, I examined basic descriptive statistics of the variables, such as means and proportions, of the variables of interest by using Qualtrics and reading tables from SAS v. 9.3.. From these preliminary results, it is clear that more research needs to see what health behaviors are prevalent in this