Literary socialization and reading preferences: Effects of parents, the library, and the school

In this article, I study the long-term effects of reading socialization in the parental home, the use that is made of the extensive supply of books in the library, and the cultural encouragement that takes place in secondary school. Employing representative data for the Netherlands in 1998 (N=1762), the first research question deals with a description of trends in reading promotion activities. In general, reading promotion has slightly increased in the Netherlands over the past five decades. There is an especially strong increase in parental promotion activities. Furthermore, use of library facilities at an early age has shown a sharp increase and secondary schools nowadays seem to pay more attention to the cultural education of their pupils than they used to. The second question deals with the effectiveness of reading promotion. The results indicate that if young people have experienced a great deal of attention to reading in their youth, this has a positive influence on their reading level in adult life. First, parents who read literature relatively often, as well as direct parental stimulation, have positive consequences for present reading levels. Second, people who in their youth were library members for a long time later have a stronger preference for literary books and suspense novels. Third, a cultural education in secondary school and the choice of an extensive humanitiesoriented set of finals seems particularly effective in stimulating pupils interest in literature.