Assignment on literature review of the proposed term paper on

Customer perceptions toward Day Care Centers in Dhaka City

Prepared for
Md. Iftekharul Amin
Assistant Professor
Course Instructor: Market Research (M 609)

Prepared by
Group 03
Samira Sahel, Roll- 10
Tahrima Faruq, Roll- 29
Naureen Afrose, Roll 31
Tanjila Tabassum, Roll - 33
Batch 49D

Institute of Business Administration (IBA)

University of Dhaka

19th September, 2014

With the passage of time the use of day care centers is becoming called for in the modern world.
A great deal of empirical evidence shows this is, indeed, a fact. Where both parents are
becoming the bread earners to keep their heads above water, it is becoming very challenging to
be a working parent as well as a child-raiser since both the tasks may overlap at certain times and
clash with each other. Also the formation of more and more nuclear families is building up the
requirement for an alternative to the traditional way of child care facilities.
With these social structural changes the attributes, acceptability concerns and cost issues of day
care centers have become an imperative matter now-a-days. Issues like the neuro-psychologist
connotation about brain development in early childhood, the satisfaction of the parents, and
profit vs non-profit day care center are also proving to be pressing features in the area. Although
the parents are not experiencing the service of day care centers but they are the decision makers
here and the apprehension they have about the effects and effectuality of such centers influence
their decisions. Therefore a relatively newly accepted concept in Bangladesh, Customer
perceptions toward Day Care Centers in Dhaka City, is selected as the research topic as it is
thought to be helpful to identify some common assumptions about the deciding factors for
parents and different aspects of day care centers.
Huntsman, L. (2008) in his research focuses on the factors that determine quality in child care for
children of preschool age and the impact of quality of care on developmental outcomes.
Research into child care quality has found lower child to staff ratios, smaller group size and
better caregiver education, qualifications and training to be associated with higher process
quality and overall quality. High quality care is associated with better child outcomes, including
better language and cognitive development and fewer behavioral problems. The link between
high quality care and positive child outcomes appears to be especially strong from disadvantaged
families. Although with little evidence, this research has also found out the difference of standard
in care between center-based and home based care. The result varied across different home and
center-based settings and also depended on the disadvantaged, non-disadvantaged population.
But for all children in formal care arrangements, center-based child care mixed with grandparent
care was associated with better developmental outcomes than other combinations of
arrangements.

Child care services provided in the US and UK are the target population of this study. And child
care in this context refers to day care centers, home based care and also care by friends and
relatives. The perspective of this research is different to that of the proposed research since it
focuses on child outcomes for determining the quality of care.
Numerous studies have ventured into investigating the impact of parents perceived service
quality on satisfaction and trust. Omar, Nazri, Abu & Omar (2003), in their article titled
Parents Perceived Service Quality, Satisfaction and Trust of a Childcare Centre: Implication on
Loyalty primarily examine the effects of parents perceived service quality on parents
satisfaction and trust. The other purpose of this study is to examine the impact of parents
satisfaction and trust on loyalty in childcare service. Data for the research is collected from 201
respondents in Kuala Lumpur and Selangor via survey technique. A comprehensive conceptual
model is developed from this data and tested by structural equation modeling using AMOS
program. The study provides empirical evidence which may increase the understanding of how
various factors such as perceived service quality, satisfaction and trust relate to loyalty within a
childcare context. Interestingly, the research findings confirm that perceived service quality has a
positive significant impact on both satisfaction and trust. Following issues have been identified
from this study:

The results reflect the notion that parents satisfaction has the strongest influence
on trust. This finding is supported by previous study such as Flavian, Guinaliu
and Gurrea (2006) which noted that trust should be greater when the satisfaction
that the business or product gives to the consumer is greater.

Parents satisfaction has no direct impact on loyalty which is a marked deviation

from Oliver (1999) and Bitner (1990) suggestions that satisfaction as sufficient
antecedent for loyalty.

Relationship characterized by trust consistently produce loyalty and positive

outcomes.

It is worthwhile to highlight that in this study satisfaction and trust were incorporated in the
model as the determinants of parents loyalty towards the childcare. Clearly, these findings led
support to the notion that relationship characterized by trust consistently produce loyalty and
positive outcome.

The article titled Child Care Cost and Quality by Helburn & Howes (1996) summarizes what
is known about the cost and quality of full-time child care in centers and family child care
homes, and about parents attention to quality in making child care choices. It relies primarily
upon two studies which are among the firsts to collect detailed information about child care
operating costs: one is the Cost, Quality, and Child Outcomes in Child Care Centers study and
another one is the Economics of Family Child Care study. This article, a collaboration between
an economist and a psychologist, examines the linkage between child care cost and quality. The
results of this analysis indicate that cost and quality are related, but that it takes only a small
amount of money to raise quality. Parents do not appear to differentiate among varying levels of
quality of child care programs, and these data indicate that parents cannot use fees as an indicator
of quality. Furthermore, there does not seem to be much consumer pressure to increase quality.
The key findings from the study are:

Parent fees comprise the largest single source of revenues for child care programs;

Personnel costs are the largest single cost in child care programs;

The cost structures in family child care homes and centers differ, but the fees and
costs to parents are similar across the two settings for pre-school goers, while
infant fees are lower in family child care homes;

Differences exist in revenue sources and cost allocation across for profit and
nonprofit centers;

Parents benefit from hidden subsidies that hold down the costs of child care.

In modern times, daycare service has emerged to enable working parents remain less worried as
they spend time away from their children at work. Choice of a suitable child care program is
crucial for the wellness of the children as well as their parents. A number of factors affect this
decision making process of the concerned parents. The article of UK Essays (2013) on
Relationships between various aspects of Childcare Center Vietnam attempts to explore some
of the significant aspects of a child care center that largely impact the decision making of the
parents in a favorable way. This study primarily stands on the basis of Omar et. al. (2003)s
research on similar aspects conducted in Malaysia. This particular study tries to develop
understanding based on assessing empirical relationship between parents perceived service
quality of a child care center with their satisfaction, trust and loyalty towards the service.
Consumer satisfaction is best described as a factor moderating the service quality or purchase

intention relationship. Satisfaction of consumer is generally derived from the use of a product.
Child care service is unique in this aspect since parents are not the direct consumers of this
service although they are the decision makers of purchase of this service. The findings of the
study are interesting for the researchers analyzing these variables in the child care services
context. The understanding of the determinants that make parents perceive a day care center to
be of adequate or superior quality can also be of much significance for the enterprises operating
in this business segment. Addressing the research objectives, a convenient sampling is done on
parents availing child care service in the biggest economic city of Vietnam. Since the study is
confined to a particular geographical area, the study findings might fall short in representing the
overall situation of child care centers for the whole country. The research design is cross
sectional as a result, the findings cannot account for causality. However, this research supports
the existing positive relation between factors like perceived quality, customer satisfaction, trust
& loyalty.
The quality of care provided by a day care center can be assessed from different perspectives.
However, the quality of care largely depends on the care givers i.e. the staff. Pines et. al. (1980)
attempts to analyze the effect of staff work load as one of the determinant of service quality. This
particular study titled Combatting Staff Burn-Out in a Day Care Center: A Case Study focuses
on showcasing the relationship of staff burn-out to the quality of service provided by the child
care centers. Burn-out is a syndrome of emotional exhaustion that can occur among individuals
who spend much of their time in working closely with other people. It can severely impair the
job holders performance. The attendants in the day care centers have to work for long hours to
take care of the children. As the care givers get burn-out, the care provided to the children gets
much affected and the quality of service provided in such circumstances become of poor quality.
As such the work environment of the staff of day care centers can play vital role in shaping the
perception about the quality of a child care service center. This study reports that large child-staff
ratios and longer working hours with children takes greater emotional toll on staff members. The
study also states that centers with less structured programs seem to show more cases of staff
burn-out.
Mallika et. al. (2011) in their paper attempt to explore relational effect of children age and
parents attitudes towards day care centers which exemplify the common pattern of customer

attitude. With this aim, the researchers have also explored the current scenario of day care
centers in Dhaka city and services provided by these centers. This research has pointed out that
the standard and quality of service is not satisfactory while identifying that customer with more
aged children besieged with more positive attitude towards the day care center. Also some
recommendations are provided to increase the generic customer attitudes toward the day care
centers and psycho-social development of children.
Although this paper has explored the situation of day care centers in Bangladesh and the
customers attitudes toward day care center, it has not provided the reasons behind this situation.
It has worked with only one factor that is age of the children. Since it has been conducted in the
context of Dhaka, it is similar to explorative part of the proposed research to some extent. So it
can be said that the proposed research is supposed to be updated and also an extended version of
this particular study dealing with the inspection of the major factors responsible for the
customers attitude toward day care center.
From the study of previous researches done in the field of child care services, it is evident that a
number of factors come at play to shape customer perception about their quality. Relationship
between factors like customer attitude, satisfaction, loyalty, trust, perceived quality, staff quality
and cost have been inquired thoroughly. Some conclusions have been drawn out of these. But
larger number of analytical studies are required to draw out the prevailing trend in this industry.
As such this field needs more analytical exploration to get a hold of the major determinants that
mold customer behavior and the industry trend. Also there hasnt been much research works,
either exploratory or conclusive, undertaken in this field till date in Bangladesh. Therefore, this
field of child care service holds much scope for researchers. The proposed research on
Customer perceptions toward Day Care Centers in Dhaka City will initially attempt to
assess the current situation of day care services in Dhaka with a stress on investigating the
various contributing factors that affect the customer attitude toward these centers. The research
will focus on noting relational impact of the major factors and subsequently empirical relation
among these factors will be attempted to be developed with a view to reaching a generalized
outcome.

References

Helburn, S. W. & Howes, C. (1996). Child Care Cost and Quality. The Future of
Children FINANCING CHILD CARE, vol. 6, no. 2, Summer/Fall, pp. 62-82. Available :
https://www.princeton.edu/futureofchildren/publications/docs/06_02_03.pdf
Huntsman, L. (2008). Determinants of Quality in child care: A review of the research
evidence. Centre for Parenting and Research, Service System Development, NSW
Department of Community Service.
Mallika, A. S. Rahman, M. W. & Jabbe, M. A. (2011). Customer attitude toward day care
center and relational effect of children age. Bangladesh Research Publication Journal,
vol.
5,
no.
4,
July-August,
pp.
359-367.
Available:
http://www.bdresearchpublications.com/admin/journal/upload/09233/09233.pdf
Omar, N. A. Nazri, M. A. Abu, N. K. & Omar, Z. (2009). Parents Perceived Service
Quality, Satisfaction and Trust of a Childcare Centre: Implication on Loyalty.
International Review of Business Research Papers, vol. 5, no. 5, September, pp. 299-314.
Available: http://www.irbrp.com/static/documents/September/2009/24.NorAsiah.pdf
Pines, A. Maslach C. (1980). Combatting Staff Burn-Out in a Day Care Center: A Case
Study. Child Care Quarterly, vol. 9, no. 1, Spring, pp. 5-16. Available :
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF01555032
Taylor, S. A. & Baker, T. L. (1994). An Assessment of the relationship between service
quality and customer satisfaction in the formation of consumers purchase intentions.
Journal of Retailing, vol. 70, no. 2, Summer, pp. 163-178. Available:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0022435994900132
UK Essays. November 2013. Relationships Between Various Aspects Of Childcare
Center
Vietnam
Marketing
Essay.
[online].
Available
from:
http://www.ukessays.com/essays/marketing/relationships-between-various-aspects-ofchildcare-center-vietnam-marketing-essay.php?cref=1