Television, Reading, and Reading Achievement

The relationship between TV use and reading achievemet is reappraised, using data from a 3-year panel study. Strong and significant bivariate correlations replicate the findings of previous studies and support the contention that television use is negatively associated with reading achievement. As increasingly sophisticated analytic techniques are applied to the data, however, the relationships are seen to become progressively weaker, more ambiguous, and less compelling. When the LISREL model is used to tease apart the effects of true change from unreliability in the measures and to account for the stability of the variables over time, three patterns become apparent. First, all three variables of interest in this 3-year panel study−reading skills, TV viewing time, and reading time−are highly intercorrelated at the outset. Second, each of the three variables remains highly stable over the entire period of the study; relatively little variance in our sample measures appears to reflect true change. Finally, what change there is in reading time or in reading skills does not seem to be related consistently to time spent viewing television. Nor does time spent reading nonschool materials seem to predict increases in reading skills to any great extent. It is suggested that the entire question of the influence of out-of-school media use on reading achievement requires a far more sophisticated approach than has been typically applied in the past.