Parent Attitudes Surrounding eBooks and Print Books: An Amazon Mechanical Turk Study

• In Event: 1-111 - Familial and Contextual Influences on Media Use for Families with Young Children

Integrative Statement

Introduction: Despite the pervasiveness of mobile screens in the home, many parents remain skeptical about the value of children’s eBooks (Rideout, 2014). Reading books aloud to preschool-aged children is associated with a host of academic benefits (Bus, van IJzendoorn & Pellegrini, 1995) and social outcomes (High et al., 2014). Whether or not parents are willing to use eBooks the same way they have used print books for decades has yet to be established. The purpose of the current study is to explore how children and parents are navigating children’s eBooks compared to print books in the home.

Method: This study used data from a survey hosted on Amazon Mechanical Turk, an online crowdsourcing platform. Parents (N = 2,260, M age = 32 years) of preschool-aged children (M age = 4.15 years) were asked to complete a brief survey that lasted about 10 minutes. Within the survey, parents answered questions about their attitudes toward and reasons for using different types of children’s books. Of particular interest here were questions about the primary reasons why parents actually read print and electronic books to their children (each parent could choose up to 3 reasons for each book format) and parent attitudes about the potential functions of different types of books (parents indicated whether each function could apply to noninteractive print, interactive print, noninteractive eBook, and interactive eBook). Control questions were used for data quality assurance.

Results: Figure 1 shows the frequency with which parents chose each reason for using print and electronic books with their young children. Learning was the most common reason for using both print (28%) and eBooks (23%). Parents were more likely to choose print (versus electronic) books for bedtime transitions (25% vs 5%) and for bonding (11% vs 4%) with their children, whereas parents were more likely to use electronic (versus print) books for entertaining their children (21% vs 12%) and for occupying their children while traveling (15% vs 4%) or while parents are busy (11% vs 3%). Figure 2 shows the relative frequency with which parents felt each of four functions applied to each of four book formats. Parents often chose all four functions for traditional (noninteractive print) books, such that each of the four functions was selected roughly the same number of times. Conversely, the other three book formats (interactive print, noninteractive eBook, interactive eBook) were most likely to be associated with learning and entertainment functions, with relatively fewer parents associating these book formats with calming and bonding with their child.

Conclusion: This study suggests that parents predominantly use eBooks for learning and entertainment purposes compared to print books. It seems that print books – particularly noninteractive print books – are considered important for familial bonding, while eBooks are meaningful for children’s alone time. These findings suggest that even if content is similar across print and electronic books, parents might use these books to serve different purposes. Future research should consider the individual roles that eBooks and print books serve and strive to maximize their individual utility.

Authors

• Roxanne Etta, University of Wisconsin-Madison
  Presenting Author

• Elizabeth Skora Horgan, University of Wisconsin-Madison
  Non-Presenting Author

• Heather Kirkorian, University of Wisconsin-Madison
  Non-Presenting Author