Can a Home-Based Intervention Program Support Parents’ Engagement in Book-Sharing Practices with their Children?

• In Event: 2-204 - Variations in Parent-Child Book-Sharing Practices at Home and their Relations to Child Outcomes

Integrative Statement

A significant number of parents appear to have difficulties engaging regularly in book-sharing routines with their children. In the U.S., nationally representative studies find that as much as one-third of parents do not read regularly to their young children. It is important to understand whether parental participation in structured home-based reading programs with their children show similar trends. This study examined parental implementation of a 15-week home-based book-reading program with their 4-year-old children, all of whom had language impairment (LI). Parents who enrolled in the program were provided extensive supports to read one new book provided each week to their child four times, for a targeted total of 60 home-based reading sessions. We addressed three questions: (1) To what extent do caregivers of children with LI complete a 15-week home-based book-reading program? (2) Among those caregivers who do not implement as prescribed, do they tend to attrite early or later in the program? (3) To what extent can completion/attrition be predicted from initial caregiver- and child-level characteristics?
Participants were 128 parents and their 4-year-old children with LI living in a Midwest city in the U.S. The sample was diverse with respect to race, ethnicity, and SES. All parents agreed to complete a 15-week home-reading program and to meet regularly with research staff to receive new books and provide recordings and logs of completed sessions, which were used to carefully document ongoing implementation of the reading sessions as well as attrition from the program.

To address the research questions, we used survival analysis to understand completion status and duration of stay in the home-reading program, and to examine variables that may relate to these outcomes. The nonparametric life-table survival estimates are presented in Table 1, which includes effective sample size, number of dropouts, hazard function, cumulative hazard function, and survival function. The corresponding survival curve is presented in Figure 1. Survival function (Table 1) shows that by week 15 of the program, only 55% of parents are retained in/have completed the program. Figure 1 displays the loss over the weeks of the program. These data address question 1 (about one-half of parents complete the 15-week home-reading program) and question 2 (parents tend to attrite earlier rather than later in the program), given that only 80% of parents were retained after the first week (see survival function in Table 1). Using multinomial logistic regression, we identified characteristics differentiating the completers and attriters, finding that the former was associated with higher literacy skills among the children, lower SES, and fewer home-literacy resources (all ps < .05).

This study shows that maintenance of parents of young children in home-based reading programming may present special challenges. This is an important finding, given the plethora of studies showing the efficacy of such programs for young children, which often do not carefully study implementation and retention of parents in such programs. Given the developmental benefits of such programs for children, especially those at-risk, we must identify ways to help parents maintain regular reading practices with their children.

Authors

• Laura Justice, The Ohio State University
  Presenting Author

• Jessica Logan, The Ohio State University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Jing Chen, The Ohio State University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Sherine Tambyraja, The Ohio State University
  Non-Presenting Author