Increasing accountability in child care practice through the use of single case evaluation

Child care workers are increasingly asked to respond to calls to demonstrate the effectiveness of their practice. The usual means of doing so has been through the use of traditional group comparison research methods. However, such approaches have a number of shortcomings and tend to provide program level information only. Such data is most useful to managers and funders but questions about whether specific clients are really being helped remain unanswered. Single case methods can provide case-level information to answer questions about the fate of individual clients and can be an ongoing source of feedback to child care workers, thus enhancing accountable practice by enabling them to make informed and well-founded practice decisions. Single case techniques can also be implemented at the unit level and help guide child care teams in making program decisions. This paper discusses the uses and limitations of traditional and single case methods as tools of accountability and provides a number of illustrations of the use of single subject methods in child care work.