Reading Habits of the College Students in the 21st Century

Abstract

Reading has increasingly been the object of empirical and theoretical investigations since a long past. It has been studied from every possible dimension by researchers of different disciplines like Psychology, Sociology, Education, Media Studies and Library and Information Science. The present study, which is a part of Ph.D. programme, aims to investigate the reading habits of the college students in Kashmir Valley. The survey method of research was applied to conduct the study and questionnaire was used as a data collection tool. The results reveal that the college students have positive attitudes towards reading and majority of them spend almost two hours on academic and non-academic reading daily. The students developed reading habits mostly through self efforts followed up with the help of parents and teachers respectively. The college students prefer to read in morning, at home and in English. The results also depict that students mostly read for education followed by information. The preferred subject interest of students is Religion followed by Science and Technology and Literature respectively. The results further reveal that majority of the students exploit their personal collection followed by college library to satisfy their reading needs. The students face many problems in getting reading materials like restriction on borrowing in libraries, inadequate collection, price hike of reading materials and poor organisation of libraries.