Reading Format Preferences of Students - Print vs Electronic Academic Reading Format International Study #ecil2015

After lunch, I am attending a session looking at print/digital reading: I'm liveblogging from the European Conference on Information Literacy 2015 in Tallinn. The session started with Reading Format Preferences of Students - Print vs Electronic Academic Reading Format International Study: Investigating the “Print or Electronic” Question around the World from Diane Mizrachi, Joumana Boustany and Serap Kurbanoğlu.
The study was stimulated by a presentation from Mizrachi at the last ECIL conference, into preferences of students at UCLA (USA). Findings from that included that: undergraduate students preferred print, but liked the convenience of electronic. Their preference also depended on context e.g. if a paper was important or long they preferred to print it. Kurbanoğlu presented the next section of the talk, which explained the research network that has developed to do multi-country studies.
In this particular case they used the Limesurvey survey tool. The researchers from each country had responsibility for the survey in threir own language (Limesurvey has a feature that makes formatting this easier). The survey has 25 questions. 9650 completed answers have been collected from 22 countries, with 4 more about to participate. Whilst most questions are uniform, there are some differences (notably, different qualification). They are starting analysis this month (though some national results were being presented later in the session): they have had to do a small amount of data cleaning, and translate comments into English.