This project is a consortium-level study being carried out through a research grant to Oregon State University, a member of the Oregon Child Care Research Partnership. The study is exploring relationships between state subsidy policies, the duration of individual subsidy use, patterns of child care and duration of individual child care arrangements. Participating states include Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Oregon, and Texas. Child care policies related to the Child Care and Development Fund, Temporary Assistance to Needy Families and state-funded subsidy programs are being examined. Each state is contributing records for a large number of households who receive subsidized child care services. The project will develop (1) state-level longitudinally reconfigured data sets with identical data elements and structures; and (2) a multi-state data set combining samples from each of the six states; (3) institutional-level policy variables which will be added to the combined data set; (4) linkage of monthly records within each state data set over time at the child level to create six anonymous, longitudinally reconfigured state data sets; and (5) a single, multi-state database for analysis.