Evaluating the impact of book gifting on the reading behaviours of parents and young children

Abstract

We report an evaluation of a book gifting scheme (the Dolly Parton Imagination Library; DPIL) that targeted families from disadvantaged areas. We considered the impact that length of participation had on children’s interest in literacy-related activities, the frequency of parent–child reading interactions, duration of reading, and whether the parents read with their child daily (N = 286). We also compared these families to a group of non-participating families from the same city (N = 197). We found that families registered with DPIL for a year or more reported higher frequencies of parent–child interactions when reading than the non-DPIL group, and were more likely to read with their children on a daily basis than those registered with DPIL for less than a year. We suggest that book gifting schemes need to be long-term to positively influence home literacy environments.