Impacts of parents and reading promotion on creating a reading culture: Evidence from a developing context

Abstract Although the government has made an effort to encourage reading, a Vietnamese person only reads four books per year on average. As low reading culture might hinder Vietnam’s pursuit of a knowledge-driven economy, this paper examines the relationship of students’ reading attitudes with gender, reading promotion activities, parents’ involvement. A dataset of 4966 secondary students in Northern Vietnam was used. The Bayesian method was employed to analyze the relationship between students’ reading attitudes and the following factors: their gender, reading promotion activities, parents’ involvement. The findings suggest that female students show more interest in reading than male students. Shared reading between parents and children positively correlates with students’ reading attitudes while buying books for children does not. All types of activities and services promoting reading habits positively correlate with students’ attitudes towards reading activities. Among the four examined services (storytelling contests, story-writing contest, book exhibition, and drawing book illustration), storytelling contest shows a strong association with reading attitudes while drawing book illustration has the weakest impact on reading attitudes.