Subjective quality of care for children and older people and its spatial variation: a comparative investigation

This chapter has several comparative foci: we compare people's perceptions of quality with childcare and long-term care (LTC) across a number of countries and care regimes, using the European Quality of Life 2016 wave. Also, we investigate whether there is an urban–rural divide in perceived quality within countries. We identify the Nordic care regime, and the countries belonging to it, as best in terms of perceived childcare quality, and Continental regime as best regarding perceived LTC quality. Although we do not find large urban-rural gaps, we do see that there is a consistent higher perception of care in urban areas across both ECEC and LTC in three countries, the Czech Republic, Greece and Poland. The findings suggest that the introduction of subjective quality indicators adds an extra dimension to the understanding of institutional differences between care regimes, with some variation between the sectors of childcare and LTC.