Practical Approach

Estimating the Unmet Need for Services:

A Practical Approach

ABSTRACT

Welfare Reform has focused attention on the need to provide support services to the increasing numbers of low-income families entering the job market. This has heightened the interest in identifying localities lacking adequate services. In a previous writing, the authors developed a relatively complex and theoretically grounded statistical method of assessing unmet need (Queralt & Witte, 1999). The practical approach described in this paper, using a child care illustration, is easier for social agencies to apply, and yet, it yields results that are significantly correlated with the more rigorous method. The methodology the authors propose and illustrate to assess the need for services across neighborhoods is similar to that used in the designation of Medically Underserved Populations (MUPs). This approach involves the development of key measures of the availability and need for services in each local area and comparing the standing of each local area on the selected measures against the median value on each indicator for the surrounding area (i.e., the county or state), which serves as the standard. The central measure the authors use to assess availability of child care services is the number of child care slots available in a local area, indexed to the relevant child population (e.g., the number of preschool slots per preschool child in the population). Additional measures the authors take into consideration in assessing the neighborhood need for child care services include: percent of mothers with children ages 5 and under who are employed, percent of the census tract population with incomes under 200% of the Federal Poverty Level (FPL), number of public assistance recipients and of open child protective services cases as a percent of the neighborhood population, percent of families headed by one parent (male or female), and population density per square kilometer. The authors show how neighborhoods can be rated on each of the above-mentioned measures of need for child care services and assigned a score that reflects their relative standing vis-a-vis the regional standard. The total of the need scores for each neighborhood is used as evidence of its unmet need for services. Setting the median level of services in the region as the standard against which to judge the adequacy of neighborhood services can be justified on the grounds that it is a reasonable base level of service provision to aim toward, at least one that would be considered by the public to be neither too high nor too low. Being able to provide empirical evidence of unmet need in local areas can help to secure the necessary funding to distribute services more equitably.