Thapar, SheetalHarsimran Singh2018-02-152018-02-152017http://krishikosh.egranth.ac.in/handle/1/5810040941The present study was carried out to assess the reading habits of rural women in Ludhiana district of Punjab state. Demographic profile indicated that the majority of the sampled rural women belonged to relatively younger group i.e. 20-30 years. Family status revealed that majority of the women was living in nuclear family (75.8%) and occupied 2nd generation (62.5%) status in the family. Educational qualification of most of the rural women (40%) was up to matric level. The findings of the study brought out that Punjabi was the most preferential language for reading newspaper by the rural women. Jagbani and Ajit were widely acceptable and preferred newspaper for reading. The pattern of reading newspaper depicted that about 78 per cent of the total rural women have habits of reading newspaper daily and majority of them read newspaper thoroughly. More than half of the rural women i.e. 51.67 per cent reported ‘afternoon’ as the most preferred time. About 56 per cent of the total rural women also reported that they were enjoying reading newspaper after completing their households work. Among the favourite topics, ‘Health topic’ emerged as the most favourite topic as 30 per cent of the total rural women assigned rank 1 in this respect. Other favourite topics were religious, food recipes, sensational news, politics, entrainment news, cinema news and agriculture, respectively. To improve health consciousness and making healthy environment in the family emerged as the most important reason for reading health topic. The statistical analysis shows that the pattern of newspaper reading habits of rural women is greatly influenced by the social set up i.e. demographic profile of the rural women. Except caste, all other demographic characteristics like age, education, income, family status etc have significant association with newspaper reading habits of rural women in the study area.ennullThesis