An international team of researchers has published a new study that suggests that the same factors that shape how much you read can also influence your perception of what you read.
The research, published in the journal PLOS ONE, shows that the perceived impact of books on readers varies depending on the reader’s social status, age, and gender.
The team looked at the influence of social status and gender on readers’ perceptions of the books they read, using data from over 40,000 adults in 25 countries.
They also examined how readers perceived authors, genres, authorship and the amount of time they spent reading a book.
The findings showed that social status is strongly related to how much the reader reads, but gender and age are equally important.
For example, people in middle-aged age were less likely to read books with women as authors than people in their 30s.
The authorship gap is smaller in older age groups, with women’s authorship rates more than double those of men.
The researchers found that, for most readers, the amount they read is more important than the gender of the author.
For example, while people who read at least 30 books a year rated the gender and authorship of authors as equally important as those who read less than that, people who only read one or two books a month rated the authorship as more important, even when they were considered to be reading more.
Other factors also had a significant impact on readers’, including the length of time people spent reading books, how many books they had read before and how long they had been reading.
For people who spent less than a year reading a single book, reading was more important to them than how long people had been a book reader, or whether they had completed a particular reading activity.
For people who had read a book more than 20 times, the authors’ gender, age and social status were more important predictors of how many times people had read than authors’ age and the number of books they have read.
While this research could not prove that books are necessarily bad for you, the research does raise some interesting questions for future research.
For instance, could social status have an impact on how much readers read?
Could social status influence the perceived influence of books, or could social position have an influence on how many people read a particular book?
For more information about reading and book-watching, check out this handy guide to reading.
