Bookstart Around the World 1
Bookstart Around the World effects of bookgifting
programmes are thus difficult to quantify. There are, however, some examples of longitudinal studies that all point in the same direction. Wade & Moore (1998) followed children who participated in the Bookstart pilot project in Birmingham, and the results showed positive effects for the children’s language development (as well as mathematics). Cates et al. (2012) examined the way that cognitive stimuli (e.g. reading aloud) at an early age affect language development in children. They also established that there are links in longitudinal analysis. For example, another study shows connections between a low level of language activities in the home at an early age and low receptive vocabulary at the age of five (Farrant & Zubrick, 2013). Shahaeian et al. demonstrate a correlation between reading aloud in the home at a young age and school results at eight to nine years of age (2018). For example, one study shows that children who were rarely read to from the age of two and onwards had poorer results at school at six years of age (Hayes & Berthelsson, 2020). Although they did not measure language activities at ages younger than two, this does indicate that there are longterm effects. The three aforementioned studies use the same empirics and do not study the effects of any bookgifting programme. Of course, these insights are still significant, but there appears to be a lack of longitudinal studies on the longterm effects of language activities in the home for young children and the impact of bookgifting programmes. 4.5.2 Socioemotional aspects, digital literature and age when receiving gifted books There are also few studies on the possible effects of bookgifting programmes in addition to a child’s language development, such as emotional and social aspects for parents and children (Needlman and Silverstein, 2004). Socioemotional development can be described as simply the child’s ability to manage and convey feelings and social interactions. Wirth et al. (2019) studied whether the home literacy environment affects a child’s socioemotional development. They found a link between language skills and socioemotional skills; i.e., that children who have developed further also tend to be more socioemotionally developed. Via language development, the home literacy environment thus appears to affect socioemotional development in children. Such effects suggest that effective bookgifting programmes can have positive consequences for families in more ways than literacy alone. Related to this, according to our interview, is a growing interest within Reach Out and Read in a concept called early relational health. This concept aims to draw more attention towards the nursing relations that can contribute to children’s health development (CSSP, 2020). There are also several questions regarding media exposure and ebooks and how these should be used within bookgifting programmes, or whether they should be used at all. More research is called for regarding this potential (Mol et al., 2014; Bus et al., 2015; Kucirkova, 2019; Magnusson, 2020). It could, for example, involve the patterns that can be found in how children are exposed to different media in the home. For example, Mol et al. (2014) describes patterns such as parents who were experienced readers owning more books but fewer DVDs. As our exposure to media generally increases in our daytoday lives, it becomes particularly important to better understand such research questions for the future for bookgifting programmes. The question of at what point during a child’s earliest years the first intervention by a bookgifting programme should be made has also been discussed (Needlman, 2018 & Sinclair 2019). The results from one study show that reading at home when the child is as young as two weeks of age has no negative effect, which contradicts certain reservations some have, such as that parents would not continue reading with their children if it were to be introduced too early or would consider it a chore. Instead, the trends from that study show that families who received an intervention as early as at two weeks tended to read a little more than the group that received an intervention at the age of six months, although the differences were not statistically significant (Sinclair, 2019). 4.5.3 How to measure the effects? There are certain challenges in measuring the effects of bookgifting programmes. Some examples of these are that it is often necessary to rely on selfassessments from parents, where they themselves 35/52