Page 80 - Journal of Library Science in China, Vol.45, 2019

LI Guihua & LIU Jing / Transition: Adolescents’ hybrid reading in the omnimedia era 079

Recent years have seen a large amount of Chinese scholars’ research on the changes of reading
behavior of readers in the digital age. Wang Yuguang and Wang Qin (2005) point out that the
diversified development of text brings about the tendency of reading text more dispersive and
diversity. Liu Dehuan et al. (2009) believes that there is a lack of in-depth research on these
systems in the academic community because of the changes in reading subject, reading carrier,
reading content, reading method and time length of reading. Wang Youmei (2015) proposes that
the current reading promotion practices should take into consideration the changes in reading
behavior, and systematically analyze the O2O (online to online) feature of cross-media reading in
the mobile Internet era, such as the tendency of media fusion.
However, the existing research on digital reading in China prefer to regard the process of reading
behavior as an independent research object, especially the online reading and offline reading. This
makes it difficult to deeply understand the profound impact of the omnimedia environment on
reading behavior. This study aims to use “Hybrid Reading” as the object, and a whole observation
and analysis of the new reading behavior process is carried out.

2 Research design and reliability and validity analysis

2.1 Survey content design based on the reading behavior stage

Reading is the process of communication between readers and texts. Whether the communication
is successful depends on the degree of which the texts become an associated in the reader’s
consciousness (Iser, 1991). It means that the effectiveness of the reading activities depends on the
degree of how much reader’s personal perception and information processing ability in the reading
process is stimulated. That is, “reading” is only an integral part of reading behavior, not all. Based
on this, Balling (2009) suggests that the reading experience is the combination of the three stages
of pre-reading, reading and post-reading experience, each of which has different elements that
affect the reader’s reading experience, and that reading behavior is a hinged process of interaction
between the three stages of experience. The rich media environment of the Omnimedia era enables
individuals to fully carry out reading activities through various channels and various ways.
Therefore, this survey constructs the reading behavior investigation framework from the three
stages of reading timeline, pre-reading, reading and post-reading, in order to grasp the current
changing trajectory of reading behavior among young adults in more detail.
At present, the empirical research on hybrid reading has not been carried out, and there is
no corresponding measurement tool. However, Tashakkori and Teddlie (1998) believe that in
this case, in-depth interviews or focus groups can be used to collect qualitative data, which is
helpful to identify issues that require in-depth study, and then we need to conduct large sample
questionnaires based on relevant findings for descriptive and exploratory research. This study first
used in-depth interview method to carry out an open interview survey with the theme of “Trance