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Estimating the Unmet Need for Services: A Middling Approach
ABSTRACT
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Using
a child-care illustration, this article develops a concept of unmet need
applicable to the human services and a systematic method of identifying
the geographic areas where it may exist.
The authors start by inventorying the licensed and regulated
supply of child care and early childhood education services in Hampden
County, Massachusetts. To ascertain the main factors that determine the
supply, they estimate a series of reduced-form equations derived from a
child-care market model of supply and demand. In accordance with their
concept of unmet need, they predict the supply of child-care services
that would be available if each neighborhood (proxied by a census tract)
in the study area had its own demographic characteristics and a
socioeconomic level equal to the county median. Finally, the authors use
Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to map areas predicted to have the
greatest unmet need. |
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Magaly
Queralt,