Using Public Libraries: What Makes a Difference?.

Abstract

I or many years, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) has produced summary statistics about education in the United States by collecting data from the schools themselves. In the late 1980s NCES began something very different?gathering data from individuals and households through the National Household Education Survey (NHES). Library use by individuals was one of the topics included in the 1991 NHES; Jim Scheppke described those results very effectively in an article in Library Journal (Oct. 15,1994). More recently, the 1996 survey measured a different di mension of library use?library use by the whole household surveyed. This article describes the results in terms of two factors: the presence of children in the home and the race/ ethnicity of persons in the household. The 1996 National Education Survey was conducted for the U.S. Department of Education, NCES, by Westat, a sur vey research firm based in Rockford, Maryland. Data collec tion took place from January through April 1996. The sample (over 55,000 households) was selected using list-as sisted, random-digit-dialing methods and is nationally rep resentative of all civilian households in the 50 states and the District of Columbia. Because 5% of U.S. households do not have telephones, a special procedure was followed to reduce the bias caused by that lack. Survey data was col lected using computer-assisted telephone interviewing tech nology. Basic results were presented in a 12-page report, Use of Public Library Services by Households in the United States: 1996, published in the February 1997 issue of Statistics in Brief (NCES 97-446). Table 1, based on that report, shows that public library use was more common in households with children under 18 than in households without chil dren. Whereas 61% of households with children used pub lic library services in the past month, only 35% of households without children did so. When the entire past year is taken into account, households with children again show substantially higher rates of use than households without children (82% versus 54%). The results shown on Table 1 are not a surprise. It is well known that households with children use public libraries heavily. But other data gathered in the 1996 NHES enable

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