Racial and ethnic concordance, or matching, between teachers and children has been found to predict positive child outcomes (Dee, 2004; Redding, 2019), but it has rarely been examined as a source of teacher stress and depression. One study found that racial concordance is associated with lower K-12 teacher stress (McCarthy et al., 2020). The proposed study will be the first to examine the effects of teacher—children racial and ethnic concordance on stress and depression in the ECE workforce. We will also examine other staff-level (i.e., wages, supervision, professional development), center-level (i.e., turnover rate), and community-level (i.e., poverty and population density) predictors of stress and depression. Furthermore, we will explore interactions between racial and ethnic concordance and the other factors in predicting ECE staff stress and depression levels.

We will conduct secondary analyses of data from the 2019 National Survey of Early Care and Education (NSECE), a large-scale nationally representative survey of the ECE workforce. We will link the datasets from the center-based providers (center-level data) and the center-based provider workforce (staff-level data). To ensure we are conducting this study with a racial equity framework, the NSECE dataset will be assessed for potential racial and ethnic bias prior to analysis using the Racial Bias in Data Assessment Tool (Burkhardt et al., 2021), developed by the research team. We will then implement recommendations to address any identified limitations following the strategies highlighted in the tool. (author abstract)