TY - JOUR
T1 - Fiction reading in America
T2 - Explaining the gender gap
AU - Tepper, Steven J.
N1 - Funding Information:
The NadLit survey was funded by the Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics and administered by the Educational Testing Service in collaboration with Westat, Inc. Trained staff conducted personal interviews with a random sample of 24,944 adults ages 16 and older living in households who received an incentive payment to participate. Each survey participant spent approximately one hour responding to a series of diverse literacy tasks as well as questions about his or her demographic characteristics, educational background, reading practices and other areas related to literacy.
Funding Information:
The author acknowledges the generous assistance of Paul DiMaggio, Frank Dobbin, Bruce Western and the students of the 1996/1997 Empirical Seminar in the Department of Sociology at Princeton University. Also, this research was made possible by support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. * Phone: +1 609 258 5662; E-mail: sjtepper@princeton.edu
PY - 2000
Y1 - 2000
N2 - The gender gap in fiction reading has been largely ignored by sociologists and scholars in the field of reading research. This paper investigates three primary explanations for why more women read fiction than men, including: the influence of childhood socialization and genderrole stereotypes, differences in cognition and prose literacy and differences in work status and available free time. Data analysis using two. large-scale national surveys reveals that notions of gender-appropriate leisure and their influence on childhood socialization explain much of the gap in fiction reading. On the other hand, differences in reading skills and free time, as measured by work-status, seem to contribute very little to our understanding of the gap. The paper concludes by suggesting that better measures of socialization, additional information about what types of books men and women read, and more detailed time-use studies would give us additional leverage on this puzzle.
AB - The gender gap in fiction reading has been largely ignored by sociologists and scholars in the field of reading research. This paper investigates three primary explanations for why more women read fiction than men, including: the influence of childhood socialization and genderrole stereotypes, differences in cognition and prose literacy and differences in work status and available free time. Data analysis using two. large-scale national surveys reveals that notions of gender-appropriate leisure and their influence on childhood socialization explain much of the gap in fiction reading. On the other hand, differences in reading skills and free time, as measured by work-status, seem to contribute very little to our understanding of the gap. The paper concludes by suggesting that better measures of socialization, additional information about what types of books men and women read, and more detailed time-use studies would give us additional leverage on this puzzle.
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U2 - 10.1016/S0304-422X(00)00003-6
DO - 10.1016/S0304-422X(00)00003-6
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:1842829867
SN - 0304-422X
VL - 27
SP - 255
EP - 275
JO - Poetics
JF - Poetics
IS - 4
ER -