Abstract
Each year more than 40 percent of all people in the age of 18 to 20 years does not renew their subscription to the public library. As nearly two-third of all items borrowed at public libraries consists of fiction, it is hypothesized that the decision to remain using the public
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library is related to the reading of fiction. This hypothesis - popular among librarians - led to the research question: what variables can explain differences in the reading and borrowing of fiction?
Saskia Tellegen's theory on reading attitudes and Icek Ajzen's theory of planned behaviour provided the foundation for answering this question. According to their theories, differences in the frequency of fiction reading amongst adolescents could be explained by four variables:
Attitude towards reading: do adolescents regard reading as useful and pleasurable considering the outcomes (pleasure, knowledge, frustration etc) they expect from this activity?
Social norms and reading climate: do parents, friends and teachers approve of reading and do they read themselves?
Self-efficacy: are adolescents confident they will be able to understand a story?
Perceived behavioural control: if they want to read, do adolescents expect to be able to acquire books that meet their needs and skills?
Several researchers have written on the topic of reading attitude, without reaching consensus on an exact definition and conceptualisation of this construct. In this thesis reading attitude is defined as a stable, evaluative predisposition - mainly affective or experiential in nature - that is organised by experience. It is stable in the sense that an attitude does not change from one day to the next or one month to the next. It is experiential in nature as the affective or experiential component of attitudes (does reading evoke fantasies and feelings?) - rather than the rational component (does reading lead to an enlargement of knowledge or improvement of language skills?) proved to be a strong predictor of differences in reading frequency. Reading attitudes are organised by experiences in a sense that by actual reading experiences (and the pleasure or frustration they involve) adolescents acquire this evaluative predisposition.
One of the conclusions of the pilot and the main study - amongst 275 and 400 adolescents respectively - was that the (experiential component of) reading attitudes explained a substantial percentage of the variance in both reading frequency and the decision to remain using the public library among adolescents: adolescents with a positive reading attitude read more and were more inclined to remain being subscribed to the public library, even if they had to pay for library use and even if library use was no longer obligatory in the context of school tasks.
A second conclusion was that other independent variables like self-efficacy, perceived behavioural control and social norms explained little variance in reading frequency that had not been explained by reading attitude. This result led to the conclusion that the variable attitude shares common ground with self-efficacy and behavioural control. All three variables may be organised by experience: adolescents find out of reading provides pleasant experiences (attitude), if their language skills are good enough to understand a story (self-efficacy) and if the book supply in libraries and bookstores matches their needs (perceived behavioural control) by actual reading experiences.
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