Quantitative Methods

The first two sections of this chapter are concerned with identifying quantitative tools for capturing the complex benefits of reading. Rhiannon Corcoran, Josie Billington and Megan Watkins explain the processes (experimental and hypothesis-driven) by which they have discriminated clinical outcomes measures and indicators of psychological health and well-being appropriate to those engaging with literary reading who are experiencing mental health difficulties, including self-harm. Mette Steenberg, Charlotte Christiansen and Nikolai Ladegaard recount the challenges they encountered in trying to replicate the use of these measures in relation to a Danish-reading programme and the implications for standardising ‘reading for health’. In the final section, Donald Kuiken explicates the objectives of empirical phenomenology—to bring to clarity and coherence, as systematically as possible the full complexity of categories of lived experience—and offers a rationale for numeric formalisation of phenomenological procedures that facilitate the identification and articulation of different types of reading experience. Using a specific exemplary study, Kuiken reviews the distinctive contributions of numerically aided phenomenological methods to studies of reading experience, with particular attention to design factors (such as suspension of concern with explanation) that facilitate fresh revelation and clarification of different ‘species’ of reading experience.