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The Impact of Reading on Career Propects
Reading books is the only out-of-school activity for 16-year-olds linked to better career prospects, discovered sociologist Mark Taylor. Taylor analysed 17,200 questionnaire responses from people born in 1970 who gave details of their extra-curricular activities at the age of 16 and their careers at the age of 33 and found that the 16-year-olds who read books at least once a month were significantly more likely to be in a managerial or professional job at 33 than those who did not read books at all. Mark Taylor explains.
Sociologists have been thinking about reading for pleasure for years and years. We’re interested in the extent to which parents reading to their kids contributes to the children’s development: not only what it means for their vocabulary and their confidence in speaking, but also their social development. We’re interested in kids who are capable readers, who read voraciously when they’re younger but often stop by the time they become teenagers – and why this disproportionately affects boys. We’re interested in whether it makes more sense to think about reading for pleasure in terms of how much time people spend reading, or how many books they have in their household, or how often they go to the library, or how much they talk to their friends about what they’ve been reading, or something else. And we’re interested in what we actually think of as reading for pleasure: novels, sure, but poetry? Drama? Newspapers? Magazines? Whatever they can pick up online? And so on.
The impact of reading for pleasure
My research, which is firmly in this tradition, didn’t fall out of the sky – I couldn’t have investigated reading for pleasure without this sort of background. But most of the research I’ve alluded to followed the normal pattern of academia: people spent time working on different projects, presented it at academic conferences, published it in academic journals, hopefully as many people as possible would take it in and take action based on it. When I presented my research, which forms part of my PhD thesis, at the British Sociological Association’s conference in London in April, I had a couple of journalists ring me up, which turned into coverage in five national papers, a slot on the Today Programme and the World Service, and eventually various international newspapers and agencies, reporting, variously, that if you don’t read books when you’re a teenager, you might as well give up on ever getting a job.
So what am I claiming? In brief, I’m saying that not only is reading for pleasure associated with a significantly improved probability of going to university, it’s also associated with a higher probability of entering a professional or managerial job.
Firstly, I should explain how I’ve done this. In Britain, we’re very lucky to have a few excellent cohort studies. What this means is that, for a given week, every parent giving birth in a British hospital is asked if they’d be happy for their child to be part of a study. We find out a number of things about them – birth weight, where they live, some facts and figures about their parents. We then come back and find out some things about the kids, their families, and their schools, when they’re 5, 11, and 16, but we keep following them into adulthood: we learn about their medical history, whether they’ve got married, what kind of job they’re doing, whether they’ve got kids, and so on.
Significant results?
Using a cohort born in 1970, I’ve investigated whether reading at 16 is associated with more education at 23, and a managerial or professional job at 33. It turns out, in both cases, it is. For readers with an otherwise average profile, the probability of attending university rises from 23% to 32% for men and from 19% to 28% for women, and the probability of getting a professional or managerial job rises from 48% to 58% for men and from 26% to 39% for women.
How significant are these results? We can compare them to other things we think are important, such as their parents’ class position. In the previous example, the kids’ parents did what we call routine non-manual jobs – so they might have been shop assistants, administrators, and so on. We can compare them to kids whose parents were professional or managerial – a doctor or a CEO – and we find that the probability of a non-reader going to university rises from 0.24 to 0.40 for men, and from 0.19 to 0.38 for women.
I’m not just comparing groups of readers with non-readers, though. It’s no surprise that readers are more likely to have rich parents than non-readers, nor is it a surprise that rich parents end up having rich kids. So we control for a variety of things that we think are relevant: parents’ jobs, reading ability (measured by the people running the study, not by teachers), school type, and sex. For job type, we also control for education.
Taking the long view
What’s interesting about this research? At the start of this article is a list of things that sociologists have investigated with reference to reading for pleasure: this sort of research isn’t brand new. What I’ve been able to do, though, is look at a longer view. Normally, you can only look at people’s reading habits and other aspects of their lives at about the same time, or with only a few years between measurement; here, you’re able to see what the effects of reading for pleasure are much further down the line. However, we’re also very lucky in terms of being able to compare reading for pleasure with other activities. We’ve also got information on some of the other things that these kids are doing for fun when they were 16, and how they affect these same outcomes. We’re interested in this because we often hear that reading for pleasure is special: that the effects of reading for pleasure are substantively different from the effects of other teenage leisure activities.
I broke down the other teenage activities in two different ways. The first was to think about activities in terms of genre: this involved breaking things down into sports, computers and gaming, craft, reading, high culture, and media at home (watching TV, listening to records, and so on). Doing this demonstrated some interesting results: we found that participating in lots of high culture, rather than just a bit, made the biggest difference in educational attainment, but didn’t make any difference in what kind of job people ended up in. Playing sport was a similar story, although the effect wasn’t as big.
When we broke things down differently, we compared directed and undirected activity. A directed activity is something you have to make an effort to participate in: this might be going to a dance class, or going to the theatre, or going to a craft group after school. By contrast, an undirected activity you can think of as killing time: hanging out on the street came up particularly frequently. The results from this were similar: doing highbrow directed activity was associated with more education, doing more undirected activity was associated with less (but only for women), but only reading had effects that persisted beyond educational attainment
One way to think about this is to consider what education actually gets you. Maybe kids who go to the theatre, or play a musical instrument, are more likely to look impressive when they’re applying to university. When you look at people with degrees, though, you might not be interested in what they did beforehand: once you get to the level playing field of having a degree, what got you there wasn’t important. Kids who read for pleasure, though, might have got something that wasn’t only superficially attractive. Alternatively, maybe reading for pleasure is superficially attractive in the longer term: what you get from reading that impresses people doesn’t only impress university admissions officers.
What is ‘reading for pleasure’?
That’s the content of the original research paper, but it obviously raises a number of questions. Firstly, what does ‘reading for pleasure’ mean, and how is it different from ‘reading’? I’m talking about books, not magazines or newspapers or comics, but not limiting ‘books’ to fiction. I’m also excluding any reading that might be required by school, even if the kids happen to enjoy the books on the syllabus. This is particularly important for boys, as a number of boys might be good at reading, and even enjoy it, but wouldn’t do it out of choice.
The kind of books the kids are reading seems like it should be important. Not all books are the same: you’d assume that the kids reading Tolstoy are going to have different outcomes from those of the kids reading Mills & Boon (they’re reading books in 1986, remember!). The data we have on this isn’t the best: kids weren’t asked what the most recent book was they’d read for pleasure, just the last book they’d read, so there’s a disproportionate number of GCSE set texts. However, we do find out a bit about their favourite genre. It turns out, actually, the so-maligned teenage sci-fi readers have almost identical outcomes to those who self-identify as preferring non-genre fiction. Those are the biggest two groups; non-fiction readers are slightly more likely to end up at university, but it’s not a big difference. In fact, the only group appearing to do worse are those who read romance literature: all but one of those are girls, though, and we already know that girls were less likely to go to university in the eighties. (It turns out they’re also much more likely to get divorced, but I’m not down that rabbit hole yet.)
Of course, we know from our own experience that talking about readers and non-readers isn’t always a helpful distinction. For some of the kids who aren’t reading at 16, it might just be a temporary blip. While reading behaviour is certainly volatile, there are big differences between genders: 29% of those girls who said they only read ‘sometimes’ when they were 10 were reading several times a week by age 16; only 7% of boys said the same. However, 70% of those who said they never read as teenagers were reading at least once a month by the time they were 33. While reading behaviour at 16 is a very strong predictor of reading later on in life compared to things like parents’ social class, having children oneself is a much better predictor. It’s no surprise that those people with kids and a full-time job have less time to read than those people with neither.
What should we take away from this data? The original report says that there’s something special about reading for pleasure, compared with both formal reading environments and other leisure activities, and all our results bear this out, for all groups in society. We should be careful about concluding too much: a straightforward account assumes that explicitly highbrow reading has greater advantages than other types, which doesn’t turn out to be the case. However, we should ensure that whenever children and teenagers want to read, they should have the opportunity to do so.
Mark Taylor is a PhD candidate in Sociology at Nuffield College, Oxford.