Estimating the unmet need for services: A middling approach

In this article, we use a child-care illustration to develop a concept of unmet need applicable to the human services and to demonstrate a systematic method of identifying the geographic areas where it may exist. First we catalog the licensed and regulated supply of child care and early childhood education services in Hampden County, Massachusetts. To ascertain the main factors that determine the supply, we estimate a series of reduced-form equations derived from a child-care market model of supply and demand. In accordance with our concept of unmet need, we then predict the supply of child-care services that would be available if each neighborhood (proxied by a census tract) in Hampden County had its own demographic characteristics and a socioeconomic level equal to the county median. Finally, using Geographic Information Systems (GIS), we map the areas predicted to have the greatest unmet need.