• When identifying potential families to interview, are you contacting the right group of people? • Are these families in need of child care over the next few years, or do any of these families not need or no longer need child care? • Are these families representative of families who may need child care in the near future at your location (e.g. by neighborhood, by number of children, by age grouping of children, by area schools, by race/ethnicity)? • Are you including some types of families (e.g. with toddlers and pre- school children) but omitting other types of families (e.g. expecting a first child)? • Are you including more families living in neighborhoods within 2 miles, but not those within 3-5 miles of your location? • Were your families identified from only one or two sources (e.g. your church, your circle of friends and family), rather than a broader group? • When your sample is not representative of the full set of potential customers, you will miss certain groups of families who may need child care, thus underestimating potential clients, and/or overemphasize those who need child care, thus overestimating potential clients. • How many families are you interviewing? The more families – who are representative of families potentially needing child care services such as yours and at your location – you can interview, the better your data will be. • Not all families you identify will have time to respond to your call, survey, or request for an interview. You need to consider the non- responding families and their impact on your data. Do the non- respondents share particular characteristics? Can you contact the non-responding families again, and in a different way, to encourage them to respond? Simply increasing the number of families to contact may not be the appropriate solution. While in some cases
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