The participants were members of a high-achieving English class of twelve- to thirteen-year-olds in a rural comprehensive school in Eastern England. The study was structured by five research questions divided into two related groups. The first set comprised substantive questions about the social and cultural orientation of young readers:
1. Why and how do these habitual, committed readers read? 2. How do they construe the material they read? 3. Through what social interactions and cultural values is their readership
shaped? The second set was more methodologically orientated:
4. How does interpreting the data from spatial perspectives affect the construction of readers, reading and readership?
5. How does taking a historical perspective illuminate contemporary young readers, reading and readership?