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158 Journal of Library Science in China, Vol. 7, 2015

are key users at whom reading promotion targets (Fan, 2013; B. J. Liu, 2009; Zhu, 2010). Non-
profit organizations, libraries, especially public and school libraries have responsibilities to
promote adolescents’ reading activity. The present study revealed that Socializing Motivation was
more important in determining adolescents’ social reading behavior than the Intrinsic Motivation
and Goals for Achievement, and also found that the whole could be divided into several groups
of students who had distinctively different motivational profiles and that there were gender
differences and living area differences for the overall social reading motivation and some of the
dimensions. These results could enlighten librarians, teachers and parents to think of helping
students to deal with the relationship between traditional reading and social reading, and applying
various motivation strategies to different groups of students.
Several limitations of this study should be acknowledged. First of all, although more than 1 000
samples were attained from 14 middle schools through multi-step cluster sampling, they were
limited to Shanghai. As is known to all, Shanghai is one of the most developed cities in China in
terms of economic and educational level. Therefore, caution must be taken in generalizing the
results, and the same investigation should be conducted in other cities to improve the external
reliabilities. Secondly, the present study is an exploratory study, and the different dimensions of
adolescents’ social reading motivation identified need further examination through research such
as CFA, which allows researchers to test directly proposed models of the structure of relations
obtained in a set of variables (M. L. Wu, 2009), in this case the three categories and six dimensions
of social reading motivation. Finally, the present study focused on the dimensions of social
reading motivation and the group differences from the perspective of demographic variables such
as gender, grade and living area. However, the other important issues, such as the relationship
between social reading motivation and behaviors, and the mechanism of adolescents’ social reading
activity, were under explored. These issues will be addressed in our future work.

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