The Master's thesis explores young people's experience during everyday reading and its impact on their abilities, their ways of coping with stressful situations, as well as their overall well-being and mental health.
In the theoretical framework, we define the concept of mental health and describe the current state of student's mental health. This section also includes the role of the school in supporting student's mental health, particularly in connection with reading and its influence on young people's reading habits. We further define bibliotherapy as one of the reading-based approaches to addressing mental health challenges, highlighting the essential differences between our approach compared to biblioteraphy. Next, we explore the concept of experience, which Stanko Gogala identified as a central pedagogical concept and as an essential element of children's up-bringing. We then examine both conscious and less conscious processes that occur during everyday reading, and analyze how these processes affect an individual's experience while reading and afterwards, in daily life. The study further defines the processes of interpretation, perspectivism, identification, and catharsis, as well as the experiences of relaxation, calmness, and mindfulness during reading.
Through our research, we investigate whether these processes emerge during individuals’ everyday reading experiences and, in conclusion, consider ways in which such processes could be further encouraged and supported. Eight semi-structured interviews were conducted with young adults who were full-time students during the Covid-19 pandemic. The collected data were analyzed qualitatively and compared with the theoretical framework. The findings show that participants’ responses largely support our assumptions about the positive impact of reading on mental health, although not all complex processes could be directly identified. The study also examined the role of schools in promoting students’ mental health and school's influence on reading habits of the interviewees. We found that schools hold significant potential in this regard, but we believe that more attention could be devoted to reading, encouraging reading, and fostering the experience of the complex processes that occur during reading. We see this as an important foundation for further exploration.
|
