What do parents value in a child care provider? Evidence from Yelp consumer reviews

Publication date: 2nd Quarter 2020Source: Early Childhood Research Quarterly, Volume 51Author(s): Chris M. Herbst, Kevin C. Desouza, Saud Al-Ashri, Srinivasa Srivatsav Kandala, Mayank Khullar, Vikash BajajAbstractThis paper exploits novel data and empirical methods to examine parental preferences for child care. Specifically, we analyze consumer reviews of child care businesses posted on the website Yelp.com. A key advantage of Yelp is that it contains a large volume of unstructured information about a broad set of child care programs located in demographically and economically diverse communities. Thus our analysis relies on a combination of theory- and data-driven methodologies to organize and classify the characteristics of child care that are assessed by parents. We also use natural language processing techniques to examine the affect and psychological tones expressed in the reviews. Our main results are threefold. First, conditional on contributing a Yelp review, consumers overall are highly satisfied with their child care provider, although those in higher-income markets are substantially more satisfied than their counterparts in lower-income markets. Second, the program characteristics most commonly evaluated by consumers relate to safety, quality of the learning environment, and child-teacher interactions. However, those in lower- and higher-income markets evaluate different characteristics in their reviews. The former is more likely to comment on a program’s practi...
Source: Early Childhood Research Quarterly - Category: Child Development Source Type: research