Aims: Consider the effects of daycare on childrens' subsequent school performance and social/emotional skills.
Procedure: In a longitudinal study using interviews and questionnaires, children were followed from when they entered daycare until age 13 and assessed for cognitive/language/social skills as compared with a group of children who had never been in daycare.
Findings: The children who entered childcare performed better on both cognitive and social criteria. The improvement was more noticeable the earlier they had entered childcare, and in all cases was better than for the children who had never attended childcare.
Conclusion: This suggests that daycare is a positive thing.
Strength: The study supported one done by Kagan(1980) and so has some reliability.
Strength: The comprehensive nature of the follow-up means that there was a lot of data available from which conclusions could be drawn.
Weakness 1: Sweden has a famously high standard of daycare, and so the results may not apply in different cultures/societies.
Weakness 2: Vandell and Corasaniti found opposite results in their study