Researchers develop and validate a parent satisfaction scale for Finnish early education

When a one-year-old child starts attending early childhood education and care, parents are placing their most precious possession in someone else’s hands for hours every day. A new study from Finland has now developed and validated the first carefully tested scale for measuring how satisfied mothers and fathers actually are with those services, and the findings reveal something striking: satisfaction is not a single feeling but a two-dimensional construct, and the joy parents see on their child’s face appears to be one of the key ingredients that feeds it. The research, published in the International Journal of Child Care and Education Policy by Lotta Saranko, Eija Räikkönen and Maarit Alasuutari of the University of Jyväskylä, offers policymakers and providers a psychometrically sound instrument for understanding what parents of infants truly value about early childhood education and care, often abbreviated as ECEC.

The study draws on survey data collected in 2016 as part of the CHILDCARE project, a large research initiative examining childcare solutions for Finnish families with one-year-old children. In Finland, the first possible transition into ECEC occurs at around nine months of age, when parental leave ends, yet participation among children under two remains comparatively low because the state simultaneously offers a cash-for-care benefit that supports home care until age three. This policy tension makes the Finnish context particularly interesting for satisfaction research. The survey was sent to 14,612 parents of children born between October 2014 and September 2015 across ten municipalities of varying sizes, with questionnaires available in five languages including Finnish, Swedish, English, Somali and Russian. From the 2,696 respondents, the researchers isolated the 798 parents whose one-year-old children were actually attending ECEC at the time of the survey, yielding an analytical sample of 661 children with a mean age of just under sixteen months.

Methodologically, the study is a textbook example of rigorous scale development. The parents rated fourteen items covering their satisfaction with different aspects of the service, from the arrangement process and location to staff turnover, group size, educational principles, and how the setting supported their child’s individual development. Each item used a forced-choice four-point scale from very dissatisfied to very satisfied, deliberately omitting a neutral midpoint so respondents had to commit to a stance. The sample was randomly split into two independent halves. On the first dataset, the team ran an exploratory factor analysis with oblique Geomin rotation to uncover the underlying dimensions. Four problematic items were pruned along the way: questions about cultural heritage suffered from high missingness, cost showed a weak factor loading, safety cross-loaded onto multiple factors, and staffing levels produced a statistically improper solution. The remaining ten items settled cleanly into a two-factor structure with excellent fit indices.

The two dimensions that emerged are conceptually illuminating. The first, labeled ECEC access and location, captures satisfaction with the practical gateway to the service: how the daycare place was arranged and where the provider is situated. The second, educational preconditions and principles, bundles together items on educational values, staff turnover, group size, nap routines, health aspects of the premises, and support for the child’s individual development. The first dimension maps onto structural quality factors, while the second blends structural and process quality. The researchers also suggest a temporal reading: access and location concerns the step that has already happened, namely getting a place, whereas educational preconditions concern the ongoing experience at the current provider. The correlation between the two factors was moderate, around .47 and .42 in the two halves of the sample, indicating related but distinct facets of the parental experience.

Cross-validation on the second, independent dataset confirmed the two-factor model with equally strong fit statistics, and formal measurement invariance testing through exploratory structural equation modeling showed that even the strictest level of invariance, where residual variances are constrained to be equal, held across the two datasets. In plain terms, the ten items functioned identically for different groups of parents, meaning scores on the scale can be compared meaningfully across populations. The reliability of both dimensions met accepted standards. Exploratory structural equation modeling, or ESEM, was chosen precisely because it allows the integration of exploratory and confirmatory factor analytic logic within a single structural equation framework, letting the researchers monitor whether any item tapped more than one dimension, something pure confirmatory approaches would have concealed.

Perhaps the most socially significant result concerns gender. Previous research on parental satisfaction has overwhelmingly relied on mothers as informants, leaving fathers’ views largely unexamined. Here, multigroup ESEM comparisons between the 546 mothers and 252 fathers demonstrated that the factorial structure of service satisfaction is essentially the same for both parents. Weak and strong invariance were fully supported, meaning mothers and fathers attach the same meanings to the satisfaction dimensions and respond to the items in the same way. Only one item, concerning the health aspects of the provider premises, showed a slight difference in residual variance, and once this was accommodated, partial strict invariance held. Despite documented differences in how involved mothers and fathers are in daily ECEC life, they appear to evaluate the service through remarkably similar lenses.

The study then probed whether parental satisfaction is linked to the child’s own experience, as perceived by the parent. Parents rated their child’s enjoyment in ECEC over the previous four weeks using six items measuring how often the child seemed comfortable, eager and happy in the setting. Both satisfaction dimensions correlated positively with this enjoyment factor, supporting the scale’s concurrent validity: the more satisfied parents were with access and location, and with educational preconditions and principles, the higher they rated their child’s enjoyment. Crucially, however, a Fornell–Larcker discriminant validity test showed that the average variance extracted by each construct exceeded the variance it shared with the others. Service satisfaction and child enjoyment, in other words, are statistically separable concepts. A happy child nudges parental satisfaction upward, but a happy child alone does not guarantee it.

This distinction matters because parents are, in a sense, outsiders to the service. They do not sit in the classroom all day, so they must reconstruct quality from fragmented signals: brief daily exchanges with staff, the child’s mood at drop-off and pick-up, stories the child tells, and digital communication from the center. Prior literature shows that parents generally rate ECEC quality more favorably than professional observers do, and that highly educated parents are more critical. A recent Finnish family barometer survey found that over a third of parents felt staff did not regularly inform them about daily activities, and one in five felt insufficiently informed about their child’s day. Against this backdrop, the finding that child enjoyment acts as a partial conduit to parental satisfaction makes sense: for parents who cannot directly observe the pedagogical work, the child becomes the living evidence of whether the service delivers on its promise of security, comfort and stimulation.

For Finland specifically, the implications reach into demography and labor policy. The Finnish government has been encouraging mothers of young children to return to work earlier and parents to share leave more evenly, and prior research shows that dissatisfaction with ECEC is one reason mothers delay their return to employment. The authors argue that understanding and improving parental service satisfaction is therefore also relevant to Finland’s persistently declining birth rate: families weigh the availability and quality of ECEC when deciding whether and when to have children. Because roughly 78.6 percent of the participating parents held tertiary education, the sample reflects the population whose one-year-olds actually attend ECEC, since higher-educated mothers return to work earlier, though the authors caution that city dwellers and mothers are overrepresented.

The team is candid about limitations. The design is cross-sectional, so stability of the satisfaction structure over time cannot be established, and the data, though collected in 2016, predate recent shifts such as the growth in private provision and the rise in ECEC participation among under-twos from about 31 percent to over 42 percent. The researchers also note that the Finnish ECEC framework itself has remained unchanged, which lends the findings continued relevance. Future work should extend the scale to parents of three- to six-year-olds, whose pedagogy differs, and should pay closer attention to immigrant parents, whose satisfaction has been lower in other national contexts even though foreign-born parents did not stand out in this sample.

What the study ultimately delivers is a validated, gender-fair instrument plus a conceptual map. Satisfaction with early childhood services, it turns out, has two distinguishable pillars: getting in, and what happens once you are in. And the child’s visible delight is not the whole story of parental satisfaction but a meaningful, measurable part of it. For providers, the message is twofold: streamline and humanize the access process, invest in educational preconditions such as stable staff and small groups, and communicate openly with parents, because what parents see in their child’s face and hear from the staff shapes whether they trust the system entrusted with their infant.