Adolescents’ Social Reading: Motivation, Behavior and Their Relationship

• In Event: Adolescents and Media: Working Toward Adulthood

Abstract

With the development of digital texts and social media, social reading featuring interactivity and sharing is increasing popular with young readers. Drawing on the traditional reading motivation scale and new findings about digital reading motivation, the study explored the motivations of adolescents’ social reading and its relationship with the social reading behavior. Taking Reading Via WeChat as the example, we investigated 1039 high school students in Shanghai, and found that, 1) the social reading motivation is a multi-dimension construct including social interaction, self development, peer recognition, information acquisition, personal interests, killing time; 2) the Reading Act appeared to be mainly driven by intrinsic motivation while the Socializing Act seemed to be more influenced by extrinsic motivations and social purposes. The study not only confirmed the multi-dimensionality of reading motivation as a construct, but also expanded the exploration of the reading motivation and behavior in the social media age.

Authors

• WU LI, Shanghai Jiao Tong University

• Yuehua Wu, Shanghai Jiao Tong University