The Factors Affecting the Operation Effectiveness Improvement of Child Development Centers under the Local Government Organizations in the North-eastern Region of Thailand

Abstract

The objectives of this research were to study factors and evaluate the suitability of factors affecting the improvement of operation effectiveness of child development centers under local government organizations in the North-eastern region of Thailand. The study was conducted in 2 phases. The first phase was the study of factors affecting improvement of the operation effectiveness conducted by the study of relevant documents and research, the interview with 7 experts and multi-case studies of 4 distinguished child development centers. The second phase was the suitability evaluation by using confirmatory factor analysis through the assistance of LISREL software. There were 600 subjects. The study revealed the following results. 1) The factors affecting improvement of the operation effectiveness of child development centers consisted of 6 main factors as follows: (1) administration and management (2) stakeholders (3) learning process management (4) building and facilities (5) participation from all sectors (6) local politics and 2) Structural model on the factors affecting improvement of the operation effectiveness of child development centers was fitted with the empirical data with Chi-square = 230.94, df = 178, p-value = 0.00 GFI = 0.97, AGFI = 0.94, RMSEA = 0.02, CN = 557.42. The factors had positive value between 0.46 - 0.98 and all had a statistically significant level at 0.01. The equation of factors was FE = 0.90(MA) + 0.98(SH) + 0.84(TE) + 0.89(PL) + 0.84(PR) + 0.46(LP). This research is beneficial to the child development center.