A Dataset of Vietnamese Junior High School Students’ Reading Preferences and Habits

Abstract

Books are the invaluable, colossal storage of mankind’s immense scholarship and are still commonly perceived as a more reliable source of knowledge even in this age of digitized information. Extensive reading is often promoted as being vital to cognitive development, especially for students in primary and secondary education. While it could now be considered common knowledge that reading is highly beneficial, reading habits vary among individuals in the same culture and receiving the same public education. This could be due to demographic variations and differences in socioeconomic status, or other factors such as family background and education. Despite the ample literature on reading habits, there still exists a lack of holistic approach with empirical results concerning the reciprocal interactions of reading and its relevant affecting factors. This data article presents a dataset of 1676 responses to the survey “Studying reading habits and preferences” of junior high school students in Vietnam. Result analysis facilitates evaluation of reading habits and their affecting factors, thus holding implications on education measures and policy. The dataset is available with the paper.

The Relationship between Birth Order, Sex, Home Scholarly Culture and Youths’ Reading Practices in Promoting Lifelong Learning for Sustainable Development in Vietnam

“…This finding might have to do with the nature of the favorite pastimes themselves. Vuong, Le, La, Vuong, Do, Vuong, Do, Hoang, Vu, Ho and Ho [70] already reported that female and male differed in terms of hobby preferences. Table 5 presents the differences in more details.…”

“…The dataset consists of 1676 observations, a subset of the data obtained through the survey "Studying reading habits and preference of junior high school students in Vietnam" [70]. The study was conducted by Vuong and Associates office, from December 2017 to January 2018.…”

“…A complete list of variables and their explanation, as well as other details concerning the design of the study and the original questionnaire could be found in Vuong, Le, La, Vuong, Do, Vuong, Do, Hoang, Vu, Ho and Ho [70].…”

“…The results presented in this section hint at the role of the family in cultivating reading habits among pupils. They also suggest a deeper look into the relationship between familial background in children's reading habits and, broadly speaking, education, all of which can very well be tested using the dataset prepared by Vuong, Le, La, Vuong, Do, Vuong, Do, Hoang, Vu, Ho and Ho [70]. Studies have shown that the incremental effect of parent-child storybook reading diminishes as the child grows older, even in a short timespan such as from 2-3 years old to 4-5 years old [81].…”

“…It should also be noted that junior high school pupils in Vietnam intensively associate books with school. Based on the dataset published in Vuong, Le, La, Vuong, Do, Vuong, Do, Hoang, Vu, Ho and Ho [70], a large number of pupils still cited school textbooks (such as 7th Grade Literature, for example) when asked about their favorite leisure books, with an explicit requirement to exclude school textbooks. This suggests that Vietnamese pupils attribute reading to schoolwork more than to recreation, and also that their repertoire is rather limited.…”