Status: COMPLETED May 2013 - February 2014
This project measures the magnitude of the lack of child care spots available to the faculty and graduate students on the McGill downtown campus. Through background research, and the design and analysis of a survey, a concise and informative report will be produced that highlights the impacts and needs of childcare services. The project hopes to contribute to the economic and social sustainability of the McGill community.
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The downtown McGill campus currently has a serious shortage of options available for child care services. Although MAUT and PGSS have performed some informal research, there has been no formal research examining the nature or extent of this problem.
This project will measure the magnitude of the lack of child care spots and study how the unavailability of child care impacts professor and student productivity rates. A qualitative analysis will then be performed to gain additional insights into the difficulties posed by the lack of child care.
Findings will be summarized in a final report that highlights the current demand for child care at McGill and the constraints that are preventing this demand from being fulfilled. The report will focus on the impact of the lack of spots on various areas of sustainability: sustainability of employment relations, as over the past few years McGill has been accused of failure to maintain positive relations with its unions such as MUNACA, and improved child care may benefit these relationships; economic sustainability, as child care is an important factor in determining productivity rates of employed parents; and family sustainability, as it has been demonstrated that levels of family conflict are decreased with access too adequate child care.
Resources from the SPF will be used to provide a stipend for an undersgraduate student working a total of 485 hours at $12/hour. This student will be responsible for: conducting background research; designing, distributing and analyzing a survey; and creating a final report on the findings.
The report will be made available to all key stakeholders (McGill faculty members, graduate students and current childcare centres) as well as online so as to reach to the McGill community at large. It is hoped that the findings will be used to shape the future development of child care availability on the downtown McGill campus; it is particularly desired that the key stakeholders will use the information to find solutions to the problems.
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For further information conerning this project, or to get in touch with its members, please contact the krista.houser [at] mcgill.ca (SPF Administration Team).
