Studio Brief 1: Researching People and Reading

I used Reddit as a platform to discuss reading habits with other people. The questions you can ask have to be specific, but open ended, so that there can be a discussing, so I simply wrote 'why isn't reading popular?', to which I got a lot of responses. Some disagreed with me, but a few people gave me some intriguing answers which gave me a new perspective.

1. "I think some people don't want to use their imagination when reading, but would rather go see the movie instead where you don't have to much."
2. "Probably the same reason few kids ride bikes anymore: they're all to fixated on texting and video games to be interested in anything else."
3. "Other forms of entertainment require less mental effort and are more readily accessible. When is the last time you saw a commercial for a book? They don't exactly get good marketing compared to....well...anything else."
4. "It is, but people like to do many things at once...which really isn't possible when reading."

My group and I are not decided on what type of reading we plan to make people do more of, but by the sounds of it, getting people to read books would be very hard.

I also found some facts and statistics here about reading which we could possibly use to encourage people to read, depending on the route that we go down:

1. 14% of children in lower income homes rarely or never read books for pleasure.Parents are the most important reading role models for children and young people.
2. Only 1 in 5 parents easily find the opportunity to read to their children.
3. 10 to 16 year-olds who read for pleasure do better at school.
4.  46% of 16 to 24 year olds don't read for pleasure. 
5. 15% of the working age population in England (5.1m people) are at or below the level of literacy expected of an 11 year old. This figure was 16% (5.2 million people) in 2003.More people are at the lowest level of literacy than in 2003 - 1.7m compared to 1.1m.
6. Children who are read to every day at age three have a vocabulary at age five , nearly two months in advance to those that are not.
7. A child taken to the library on a monthly basis from ages three to five is two and a half months ahead an equivalent child at age five who did not visit the library so regularly