Affiliations: Librarian, Shaheed Sukhdev College of Business Studies, University of Delhi, Delhi – 110089. (E): [email protected]
Abstract: The study discussed in the present article was aimed to explore the reading habits of undergraduate students in the disciplines of social sciences, sciences, and humanities of Kirori Mal College, Ramanujan College, and Maharaja Agrasen College of University of Delhi, respectively. Reading habits include the preferred language, purpose of reading, frequency of reading, preferences for fiction and non-fiction, format preference for reading document media, preferred devices and location for reading. It also takes into account the total number of books read in a year. The study investigated the use of various social media platforms by the students of different subjects for reading and other related activities. Questionnaire—as a tool—was used for collecting the data from the sample of 384 undergraduate students belonging to different subjects. Different variable sets related to the reading habits were analysed using one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) with Brown-Forsythe and Welch test, weighted mean and percentage. The results reveal that majority of undergraduate students preferred reading in English language except the students of Hindi subject. However, few students showed mix interest for both English and Hindi languages. They read information sources mainly to gain knowledge, followed by academic purpose and for improving comprehension. Majority of students made use of WhatsApp, followed by Wikipedia (96.1%), video-sharing sites (95.1%), social networking sites (86.3%) and social Q&A sites (80.7%) for carrying out activities related to academics.
Keywords: Reading preferences, Fiction and Non-fiction books, Newspapers, Internet sources, Social media, Reading languages, Reading devices, Reading location
