Page 156 - JOURNAL OF LIBRARY SCIENCE IN CHINA 2015 Vol. 41

Wu LI / The motivation of adolescents’ social reading：A case study of middle school students’ reading via WeChat in Shanghai 155

close. Additionally, the remaining items measuring Information Acquisition, Killing Time and
Personal Interests loaded together as Factor 3.
The cluster analyses in this study provided further evidence for the multidimensionality of
social reading motivation. Students could be placed into six groups characterized by different
motivational profiles, in other words, there exist individual differences among students in their
motivational profiles indeed. These different clusters can be conceptualized from the perspective
of the above three categories. For instance, students in Cluster 4 with mixed motivation were more
motivated on Intrinsic Motivation but unmotivated on Socializing Motivation. And students in
Cluster 2 and Cluster 5 were consistently low in motivation across dimensions, but the former were
particularly low on Intrinsic Motivation while the latter on Socializing Motivation. Obviously,
the relationship between Intrinsic Motivation and Socializing Motivation of adolescents’ social
reading was complicated. As is recognized by researchers that socializing motivation belongs to
extrinsic motivation by and large (G. C. Lin & Y. Li, 2012; T. Wang & Q. Q. Zheng, 2009), the
complexity of the relationship between Intrinsic Motivation and Socializing Motivation, to a great
extent, was an embodiment of that of the relationship between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation.
Actually, there is no agreement on the relationship of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation in the
field of motivation studies. Since 1970s, different studies have got different findings. Some found
that extrinsic motivation could weaken intrinsic one, some found that extrinsic motivation could
stimulate intrinsic one, and the others came to conclusion that both could develop in the same way
(Kim, 2007; J. Zhang & Guo, 2003). Therefore, the relationship between Intrinsic Motivation and
Socializing Motivation of adolescents’ social reading needs to be further explored in the future.

4.2 Socializing motivation and its importance

Different from the findings of the previous studies (Baker & Wigfield, 1999; C. Y. Liu, 2007;
Wigfield & Guthrie, 1997), the present study revealed that the Social Interaction in social reading
not only refers to facilitating the students’ socialization in the offline world but also means
promoting the students’ socialization within the virtual community. On one hand, students can
get lots of topics from social reading activity as they can from the traditional reading activity for
everyday conversation, thereby facilitating their social interaction with others in the real world. On
the other hand, social reading community is a virtual community based on users’ social network
and interests map (Zhan & Kang, 2013). In essential, WeChat Circle of Friends is a social reading
community, in which students can interact and share ideas with others by clicking like, making
comments, and forwarding contents around the digital texts. To some extent, these online activities
could take the place of the social interaction in the offline world. Additionally, Peer Recognition
identified in the present study refers to students’ desire for others to acknowledge their value
on facilitating information delivery in the virtual communities, rather than the one defined in