Intervention(s)
Measuring childcare is difficult even in developed countries. For example, when measuring the time invested in childcare is important to consider that there are different levels of care depending on the ability of multi-tasking: primary childcare, secondary childcare, and time spent with children. (Allard, M. et al. 2007). In addition, parental investments are higher in the first years after childbirth; considering the decrease in the fertility rate that these countries had experienced, thus drawing conclusions with a small sample of households with children under 3 years of age could be challenging (Devercelli, A. and Beaton-Day, F. 2020).
Collecting data about childcare in developing countries has specific challenges: (1) more childcare informal arrangements could be present; (2) parental unawareness of childcare options can lead to an imperfect measure of the factors that affect the demand for childcare services (Mateo-Diaz, et al., 2013); and (3) cultural and social norms could play a role on childcare decisions (World Bank, 2022).
There are two interventions:
• Parents or caregivers of children under 8 years of age that live in households assigned to treatment group 1 will be exposed to a detailed survey module to collect information of all the different childcare arrangements that the children needed in the past 4 weeks.
• Parents or caregivers of children under 8 years of age that live in households assigned to treatment group 2 will be exposed to a module that captures all the child activities in the last 24 hours and the people that were with the child at each hour.
Moreover, all households will respond to a discrete choice experiment that aims to measure respondents' willingness to pay for childcare services attributes.