How do you think that books that
children read today differ from the
ones that their parents read thirty
years ago?
And Our Research Answers
(From the Public)
By Willem and Sam
Our Topic and Research question
• We decided to look into how children's books
now differ from those of when our parents were
children, on the topic of literature. We decided
to research this because it really interested us
how books have (or have not) evolved to the
likes of children now since then. What would
you predict to happen from this question?
Our Method
• We used questionnaires to find out our data( you can see
our questions on the next slide).
• We tried to make our method as ethical as possible: by
keeping the participants anonymous, not quoting any
answers directly and consenting everyone involved.
• We asked 24 year 7 children from 2 different classes
including boys and girls.
• We kept our questionnaires down to 7 questions (knowing
that children have a short attention span).
• Adding some variation to our questions, we used a range of
question types: Likert scale (strongly agree, agree,
disagree, strongly disagree, other),yes, no questions and
open ended questions.
Coding
• In order to present the results from the open
ended questions we had to decode the
answer, which is a slow and gruelling process.
We did this by summing up the answers and
then grouping these summed up answers into
yet more groups. We used these answers to
show and analyse.
Some of the Problems that we had
The answers that we received from the questionnaires
that we sent out to members of our class were
interesting, however a lot of them were quite similar,
and a few selections weren't even ticked/circled at all!
Unfortunately, we didn’t have enough questionnaires to
go around both mine AND Sam’s forms, but we managed
to attain useful answers that will be shown throughout
the presentation.
1) What is your favourite genre of
book? (Children Year 7)
ADVENTURE
NonFiction!!
Out of the people we questioned, most liked the genre Adventure(50%), and
surprisingly, some people liked others, such as comedy or fiction. No one liked nonfiction, which wasn’t entirely surprising (but WAS worrying!) . I was surprised on how
many people liked thriller, and this graph can also show the personality of the person,
by finding out what books they like to read.
2)Why do you like this genre of book?
There is a spread of answers but ,as you can see,
children now like their favoured genre because it is
entertaining, exciting, interesting or it grips them.
3)Children’s books have more updated
genres than thirty years.
•
As you can see, children think that books are
more updated to the likes of children now in
comparison to 30 years ago, obviously more
books nowadays are on the topic of adventure
than before.
4)Would you say that Children’s books
differ from the ones there were 30
years ago? (Children Year 7)
INTERESTING…
You can see here that the people we asked mostly said yes, but they weren’t ENTIRELY
sure, which is probably due to the fact that they weren’t around 30 years ago. The least
amount of people said no and definitely not, which is quite encouraging to our main
question.
5)If so, how?(Question 4)
Opinions are very spread but most people think that they
are different in some way (likes, genres, covers) or they
have less of something (class, realistic, shorter) or more of
something (interesting, modern plot, action, language). It is
clear that books are very different now, mostly in the
content and not the cover.
6)Do you think that children today have
different appeals/attitudes towards
books than they did in the past?
In what way
do you think
we have
different
attitudes
towards
books now?
As you can see children think have different
appeals and attitudes towards books. This
question backs up our theory that books have
evolved and adapted in their genre and their
cover type (as shown by Sophie’s research).
7)Do you read a book from when your
parents were children (please say which
book)?
• Part 1:More people don’t read a book
from that time but the results for the
yes suggest that there was a lot of
classic books in the past which
children of the more intelligent end
would want to read
• Part 2:The answers for yes were: Alice
in Wonderland, Swallows and
Amazons, Famous five, the lord of the
russy rivers, Garfield, when Hitler stole
pink rabbit, cat in the hat and Lord of
the rings/The hobbit(from me). All of
these are successful, classical
children's books, this backs up part 1.
7, part 2)Continued
• In order for children to have read the books from part 2
they must have been popular in our parents
childhood(classics), this means that the common genre
or style within these books gives us a reflection on the
favoured, popular genres or styles at the time. We
looked at the genre and style of all of the classical books
that the children had read from their parents time.
These book’s genres are spread between fantasy,
adventure, comedy and war. There is a difference
between the liked genres now(mostly adventure) in
comparison to then(mixed between fantasy, adventure,
comedy and war) this is a strong point for our
conclusion.
Our conclusion
• After analysing our results from the questionnaire we found
that the answer to our research question is… that books
differ in their genre-adapting to have more adventure now,
their style of writing and their covers. It is clear that
whenever children change there likes in a book, the type of
book made for that generation is changed with it. Although
there is a change from then to now it is not major.
• Children think they have different attitudes towards books
and we think that children are pushed more to read them
now, whereas before, because they didn’t have as much
media and distraction, they read more for leisure.
Evaluations
• What do you think we could have
done better?
Thanks and acknowledgements
• A special thanks to Dr Cindy, Mrs Doyle and
Miss Smith for helping and guiding us in our
work and thanks Willem for making me do
most of the work. Thank you so much!