Exploring Subjective Assessments of Social Investment Interventions in Childcare Services

In recent decades, providing high-quality childcare services has been one of the top priorities on the academic and political social investment (SI) agenda. Most SI scholarly literature on childcare has focused on objective country-level welfare indicators, or top-down perspective, providing an incomplete understanding of childcare services as SI. Unlike the traditional SI top-down way of analysing childcare quality around the EU, it largely ignores individuals, or as I define in this doctoral thesis, the bottom-up perspective when analysing European childcare services. However, existing research findings are often incomplete and contradictory, making generalising challenging. This dissertation addresses the shortcomings in the SI literature on childcare services. The aim of the thesis is to contribute to the scholarly debates on Social Investment (SI) by adopting a bottom-up perspective to analysing subjective assessments of childcare services around the EU (27) and the UK. Drawing on the SI as a theoretical and analytical framework, this thesis uses quantitative analyses and conceptualises new ways of thinking about childcare by examining childcare services from two angles: satisfaction with childcare quality and subjective work-care balance difficulties. The first article examines the extent to which educational background and income are associated with individual satisfaction with childcare quality. It also explores whether higher public expenditures on childcare lead to higher individual satisfaction with childcare quality. The second article of the thesis analyses how individual user satisfaction with childcare quality is influenced by country-level indicators in the EU (27) and the UK. The third article of the thesis investigates employed women’s subjective work-care balance difficulties in relation to childcare-related factors and their work hours. The key dissertation findings show that the bottom-up perspective is crucial in the SI framework and is not shaped in isolation from the socioeconomic, institutional childcare and broader country context. The main findings illustrate that top-down indicators shape bottom-up assessments, but their relationship is not straightforward. The thesis findings suggest that social class is important in shaping subjective assessments. Better-off individuals are more likely to emphasise child-centred factors regarding childcare quality, making them more critical and demanding. On the contrary, results suggest that worse-off individuals are more satisfied with childcare quality because they are likely to assess public childcare services from the parent/carer-centred perspective. In other words, individuals with lower socioeconomic assess satisfaction with childcare quality from a practical childcare consideration, i.e., relief from care duties and being able to manage work and care responsibilities. Another important aspect of the main findings is contextual and institutional childcare factors matter. Still, they do not necessarily directly translate into more favourable subjective assessments. The thesis findings suggest that simply looking at associations between childcare-related factors and subjective assessments is insufficient. There are a number of underlying factors, such as gendered care norms, that encourage revisiting SI policies. The study’s findings call into question the effectiveness of SI policies and their ability to address the evolving needs of women in reconciling work and care responsibilities. This dissertation takes several innovative steps in the SI and childcare literature. First, this thesis presents a comprehensive account of subjective assessments of childcare services from the bottom-up perspective, challenging the dominant top-down academic scholarship on childcare services assessment. Secondly, it fills a contradictory evidence gap using the European Quality of Life Survey 2016 wave 4 data for all selected European countries.