Page 67 - Journal of Library Science in China 2020 Vol.46

066 Journal of Library Science in China, Vol.12, 2020

The so-called public reading refers to individual borrowing, collective reading, and participation
in reading activities and reading communication in public cultural institutions or space such as
public libraries and farmers’ reading rooms. Different from private reading, “public reading is
public beneficial, basic, equitable and convenient” (JIN, 2015, p.5), which is not only an important
way to protect the people’s reading rights and interests in contemporary civil society, but also “a
significant channel to establish common sense among citizens” (X. Y. WANG, 2011, p.39). And it
is endowed with the instrumental value of promoting knowledge dissemination, improving national
cultural literacy, and shaping mainstream values and cultural identity. Therefore, from advocating
the implementation of “Knowledge Project” to the nationwide reading activities, public reading
has gradually become the public policy practice of the party and the government.
Over the past decade of nationwide reading campaign, China’s national reading rate has risen
from 69.7 percent in 2008 to 80.8 percent in 2018 . “Public reading, as the core and foundation of
〇a ①
national reading” (JIN, 2015, p.5), has made a great contribution. Nevertheless, it is undeniable
that the situation of public reading of rural residents is still not optimistic, with obvious
characteristics of low participation. In order to further explore the causes of low participation in
rural public reading, this paper takes the farmers’ reading room as the observation center, analyzing
〇b ②
the questionnaires and empirical interviews in 77 administrative villages in Hubei Province .
By establishing the three-dimensional attribution model of person, stimulus and circumstance,
this paper probes into the causes and internal mechanism of the low-level participation of rural
residents in public reading, and puts forward corresponding coping strategies.

1 Literature and theory review

Attribution is the process of explaining and inferring the reasons for one’s own or others’
behaviors. Fritz Heider, an Austrian social psychologist, established two-dimensional attribution
theory models of “environment—externality” and “individual—internality” (C. H. XIAO, 2017),
which became the foundation of subsequent attribution research. Harold Harding Kelley, a famous
American social psychologist, proposed a three-dimensional attribution theory that includes person,
stimulus and circumstance, and uses three kinds of information, namely consensus, consistency and
distinctiveness, to determine the real cause (C. H. XIAO, 2017). In 1972, American psychologist
B. Weiner put forward the attribution theory of success and failure, believing that ability, effort,
difficulty of task, luck, physical and mental condition, and external environment are the six main
factors in explaining success or failure (Weiner, 1984). After the development and improvement

① Data Source: Results of the 16th National Reading Survey released. Retrieved June 04, 2019, from http://www.sohu.com/
a/308512376_120060294.
② What needs to be explained is that most of the public reading resources in rural areas are concentrated in farmers’ reading rooms,
and most of the original reading resources such as the rural culture room (library) in administrative villages have been integrated
with farmers’ reading rooms. The public reading services provided by county libraries and township libraries in rural areas often
cooperate with farmers’ reading rooms. Therefore, the research group mainly centered on the farmers’ reading rooms to carry out
the investigation of public reading participation.