The Three-Way Interaction: Investigating Factors Related to Caregiver and Child Engagement During Shared Book Reading Experiences

My summer fellowship investigates caregiver and child engagement by investigating potential factors that boost enjoyment and attention during the joint experience. Joint booking reading experiences can be seen as a three-way interaction between child, caregiver, and book content. Data was collected from a self-reported online survey, distributed by Prolific, a UK-based online research platform. Caregivers were asked to self-report four titles they had read to their child in the past two weeks: two books they perceived their child enjoying the most, and two titles their child enjoyed less. Caregivers also rated their child’s enjoyment and their own enjoyment for each book as well as open-ended responses to justify each of their ratings. Open-ended responses were thematically categorized and coded based on their positive or negative association with either child or caregiver enjoyment. I investigated potential factors related to engagement based on whether they had to do with the book itself (textual factors) or had to do with the interaction between child and caregiver (extratextual factors). Engagement was quantified by aggregating enjoyment with factors that demonstrated attention towards the joint experience. I found no factors that had a significant relationship with engagement. Although, I did find evidence that caregivers with higher educational backgrounds use more elaborate reading styles. Due to the large range in age of the children (0 to 5 years) further research is needed to account for developmental differences among these ages.