Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
I wonder if such a survey is not inherently biased. Are people who do read books not much more likely to agree to participate in a survey about reading than those who don't? 88% of adults reading an average of 20 books a year each seems astonishingly high.
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One way to check the plausibility of the survey results is to compare with other sources. I had a look at the public library statistics to see how many books were borrowed each year, and although I couldn't find out the proportion of adult vs. childrens' books, from what I can tell the totals are not inconsistent with the survey results.
The survey result of 20.6 read books per adult is calculated as 57,854,100 books read by 2,804,900 adults. (Appendix 2, page 5. 2,804,900 being 88% of the adult population.)
The report says that 29% of 34,656,500 (~10,000,000) fiction books (page 11) and 30% of 19,438,700 (~5,800,000) non-fiction books (page 13) read by adults were borrowed from a public library, so if a similar proportion of the 3,758,900 poetry books read were borrowed (~1,200,000 say) then the public librarys need to account for about 17,000,000 books that the survey says were read.
According to
Public Libraries of New Zealand statistics for the 2015/2016 year, there were 35,214,362 loans to public library users.
So the survey results regards library borrowing seem plausible to me (they could even be understated.) Perhaps the other results are plausible too.