Teenagers and books - from daily reading to avoidance.

This paper reports a survey conducted in May 2010 on a nationally representative sample of fifteen-year olds from 70 lower secondary schools. The general research question concerned the prevalence of Polish adolescents who did not read books after completing the phase of compulsory education. The aim of this study was to describe the place of books in teenage everyday life in terms of their reading for school, leisure, spontaneous choice of reading matter, their favourites, books they recommended, value placed on enjoyable reading and their social circle of readers. Gender was found to be a differentiating factor in the reading habits of these young people which the paper broadly describes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]