Page 78 - Journal of Library Science in China 2020 Vol.46

CHEN Geng & HU Yachun / The attribution analysis of low participation in public reading 077
among rural residents: A survey from 77 administrative villages and rural libraries in Hubei Province

publicity frequency of farmers’ reading rooms was also low: 47.3% of the reading rooms 1-2
times a year, 18.9% 3-4 times a year, and 27.0% more than 4 times a year. In addition, the
enthusiasm of publicity was not high. During the visit, few signs were found to guide rural
residents to the farmers’ reading room in the village. In some areas, there was almost nothing
related to the farmers’ reading room in the “village affairs publicity bulletin” of the villagers
committee.
In the context of poor effect of mass communication and organizational communication,
interpersonal communication has become an important supplementary channel for rural
residents to know about the farmers’ reading rooms. Modern communication theory believes
that the combination of mass media communication and interpersonal communication is the
best way to promote new things (Rogers, 2002). Rural areas with relatively encapsulated
information have the characteristic of “acquaintance socializing”, where the interpersonal
communication between neighbors is the most common and effective transmission path.
According to the survey data, 22.2% of rural residents knew about the farmers’ reading
room through others. This proportion was higher than the mass and organizational means
of communication such as computer networks, microblog and WeChat, village meetings,
blackboard bulletins and publicity bulletins, which had a good spreading effect.
Nevertheless, it must be noted that although the increase of awareness will inevitably
promote the increase of participation, it is difficult to achieve the same proportion of increase
in participation even if the awareness of the farmers’ reading room is fully covered. This is
because in the relatively stable field space of rural areas, 58.2% of the residents still do not
know the farmers’ reading room after its launch for more than 10 years, indicating that a large
number of groups are in a state of unconsciousness and have no demand for reading or public
reading. The findings of questionnaires and interviews also came to this conclusion. Among
the 1,176 people who did not know about the rural library, 55.1% of them had no reading
habit, 71.1% had no obvious preference for reading (including disliking very much, disliking
and moderate), and 50.4% did not recognize the importance of reading (including very
unimportant, unimportant and moderate). From the perspective of persons, these groups have
no clear need and motivation to read. Of course, there are also some groups who have needs
but fail to participate because they do not know the farmers’ reading room. Therefore, how
to effectively convey information to the groups with demands and motivate the unconscious
groups without demands as potential participants is the main approach to innovate the means
of supply-side communication.

3.3 Circumstance

Rural residents’ public reading participation is a group behavior, which is an intermittent and long-
term process. As a result, the circumstance discussed in this paper is not a fixed and relatively static