Page 35 - Creating a Community of Resiliency

Preparedness and Response Readiness: Los Angeles County Early Care and Education Providers
LACDPH and CCRC partnered to conduct focus groups to examine early care and education providers’ emergency preparedness, perceived risk, and resources needed for preparing for and recovering from emergency or natural disaster. The findings were used to help design the toolkit used to train child care providers and in general to inform R&R agencies how they can best support early care and education providers in emergency preparedness and response.
Four groups of early care and education providers in three R&R agencies across Los Angeles County (as shown in Table 6) participated in the focus groups in September 2012. While resources were not available to sample the full range of early care and education provider types at each of the selected R&R agencies, an effort was made to ensure that the ethnically and linguistically diverse groups of early care and education providers served by the R&R agencies were represented in this sample.
Two of the focus groups were conducted in English, one in Spanish, and one in Chinese. (Appendix B provides the English version of the provider focus group questions.) The early care and education providers ranged in age from 20 to 74 years (mean=43.45) and served 3 to 200 children (mean=36 children per child care site). Forty-two percent of the participants self-identified as Asian, 40% Hispanic/ Latino, 10% White/Caucasian, and 4% Black/African American. Two percent did not identify their race or ethnicity. Providers had a median household income of $35,000 to $49,999 a year, and 68% of the participants had some college education or higher. See Table 7 for the specific breakdown of demographic information.
Table 6. Focus Group Composition
Group 1 Options Chinese Family Child Care 19 Group 3 CCRC–Antelope Valley English Child Care Center 5 Total Participants 50
Group
R & R Agency
Language
Provider Type
Number of Participants
Group 2
CCRC–Headquarters
Spanish
Family Child Care
18
Group 4
Pathways
English
Child Care Center
8
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