Experimental impacts of a large-scale book giveaway intervention on parental literacy education beliefs

• Causal evidence links book giveaways to parental literacy education beliefs. • Evaluate a large-scale book giveaway in China reaching 100,000 families yearly. • Randomized encouragement design to address self-selection biases. • Pioneering use of conjoint analysis in education and psychology. • RSP participation increased parental valuation of HLE. Book giveaways offer free books to hundreds of millions of children and families worldwide. However, little evidence exists of a causal link between book giveaways and a transformative shift in parental literacy education beliefs. The Reading Start Project (RSP) is a large-scale book giveaway intervention program implemented in China. RSP distributes free picture books and literacy education materials to 100,000 families every year. We recruited 1052 Chinese families and children from the eligible population to evaluate its effectiveness. Using a randomized encouragement research design with conjoint analyses, we estimated the causal impact of RSP on parental literacy education beliefs. RSP participation increased the value parents placed on purchasing picture books and their sense of efficacy in home literacy practices, especially among lower-education mothers and families with fewer books. As the largest home literacy intervention program for Chinese children, RSP has a profound social impact and provides an important empirical reference for promoting early family literacy interventions in China and other developing countries.