Page 85 - Journal of Library Science in China 2020 Vol.46

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

reading are complex and diverse, including single factors and compound factors.

4.1.2 Rural residents’ low participation in public reading have different internal and external
reasons and hierarchical structure exist among the reasons, while the attribution of person is more
fundamental
Materialist dialectics believes that the development of things is the result of the joint action of
internal and external causes. Internal causes are the first, which determine the basic trend of the
development of things. External causes are the second, accelerating or delaying the development
of things, and they act through internal causes. Among the 8 combinations of attributions shown in
Table 4, person appeared as the internal cause for seven times, three times as the single attribution,
three times as the composite attribution with stimulus or circumstance, and once as composite
attribution with stimulus and circumstance. Stimulus appeared four times as an external cause,
once as a single attribution, twice as a composite attribution with person, and once as a composite
attribution with person and circumstance. The circumstance also appeared twice as an external
cause, once as a composite attribution with person, once as a composite attribution with person
and stimulus, but did not appear as a single attribution. From the frequency of person, stimulus and
circumstance in the eight attribution conclusions as well as the verification results of village D, it
shows that circumstance, as an external cause, is difficult to affect rural residents’ public reading
participation alone, and must depend on person or stimulus, so it is a primary external factor in
attribution dimensions. Stimulus can influence rural residents’ participation as a single factor, or
together with person or circumstance, so it belongs to the secondary factor. As to person, a variety
of factors with person as the single attribution can affect participation, and they may also combine
with stimulus and circumstance to produce compound effects. As an internal factor, person has the
greatest influence on rural residents’ participation in public reading, and it belongs to the ultimate
factor. This indicates that among the factors affecting rural residents’ public reading participation,
there is also a hierarchical structure in addition to the distinction between internal and external
factors.
In other words, in the behavior chain of public reading, the external values and social identity
formed by political, economic, social, cultural and institutional environment, as well as the practice
of public reading in the rural social field, constitute the external circumstances that influence
whether rural residents participate or not. In the external context, reading resources and activities
as well as the corresponding communication stimulus constitute the necessary conditions for rural
residents to participate in public reading. Different from private reading, public reading requires
specific space and resources to take place. Finally, the ultimate reason for the occurrence of public
reading behavior of rural residents lies in the individual person. When the individual person is
supported by the circumstance and knows the rural public reading space, the individual’ reading
ability, cognition and efforts determine fundamentally the ultimate occurrence of public reading
behavior (shown in Figure 1). Therefore, in the current rural public reading environment, although