Results from April Survey on Fiction Preferences

According to Merriam-Webster's Encyclopedia of Literature® , genre may be defined as "A distinctive type or category of literary composition, such as the epic, tragedy, comedy, novel, and short story."

Our question in April asked "Which type of novel do you read most often?" Most people chose one genre, but 17 (23%) chose multiple categories.

Here are the responses we got in rank order:
24 = Science Fiction / Fantasy
23 = Mystery
18 = Historical Fiction
18 = Romance
14 = Suspense
13 = Paranormal
13 = LARGE PRINT

A total of 71 respondents answered our survey on fiction preferences. 60% (43 of the 71) completed the survey in the children's room, however we don't know for sure how many were children, as opposed to parents, grandparents, or caretakers. 37% (26/71) answered the questions at the reference desk and 3% (2/71) responded online.

In our previous surveys, we purposely did not ask for identifying information, such as age or sex of our respondents, so as not to complicate the process or to make it seem intrusive. However, we realize that knowing more about the demographics of our audience would have helped us to make our analysis more meaningful.

We don't feel we can generalize much from the results, so expect more about the topic as we work to refine our questions. By doing these informal surveys, we hope to learn more about you. At the same time, we are learning a lot more about how to administer surveys.

You'll see that our next survey makes a distinction between adult and teen programs and programs for children. We welcome your suggestions about both the content and process of these surveys.