Media Use and Media Effects

In the area of research into use and effects at the Institute, particular interest has been directed in the last few months – among other things, in connection with the evaluation of the Law on the Protection of Minors – towards media use among children and minors, particularly with regard to their dealings with screen-based games. Beyond establishing the status of research in the Federal Republic synoptically, the Institute has also participated in a research network, begun in 2005 and promoted by the EU in the framework of the „Safer Internet“-programme, with participants from 18 European countries. This project aims to present a comprehensive survey of the international status of research on the dealings of children and minors with the new digital media and of questions related to this over protecting media for minors and to develop from this research recommendations for action directed towards European policies.

In the last few years, the Institute has dealt with the question of how the „new” media and communications services combine with the „old” media and how they are embedded in the everyday life of various population groups, above all in the everyday life of children and minors. In this context, the Institute will be able, in the next few years to extend conceptually and empirically the perspectives on research into use as developed and oriented towards repertoires; since the beginning of 2007, the German Research Foundation (DFG) has been supporting a project, through which the way various population groups combine the media, which media repertoires they construct for themselves, will be investigated. The assessment are intended to cover the period from 1980 to 2005 and to document in this way how the media repertoires of the German populace have changed in the course of the shifts in media.

The interaction of old and new media is also the point of departure for a further initiative in the area of media use and effects: in the light of the obvious difficulty researchers have (as do media providers) where media environments are converging technically still further, when they seek to defining tendencies in media use though the use of particular individual media, the concept of the communication mode was developed. The thesis is that the boundaries between technical media services are indeed blurring, but that the boundaries between various communications modes and their psychic, social and cultural significance are preserved. Integrating old and new media does not mean that the specific ways of use and everyday routines bound up with various media level out and merge into an unspecific general communicative activity.

Rather more, it can be observed that very specific demarcations result between the various media services. The Institute will in future systematically investigate these, and the communication modes bound up with them; in this way, this initiative presents a counterpart from the social sciences to work motivated by a jurisprudential approach on a service-specific and diversified information regime.

Whereas the above-mentioned activities do tend to aim at research on use and reception, the Institute will in future also turn once again more firmly to questions related to effects. Points of departure for this emerge in the area of communication in health matters, for example with regard to the effectiveness of Entertainment Education. And beyond that, the Institute has developed two project concepts for internationally comparative investigations, with which it intends to research the role of the media in forming images of Europe. It intends to find out how people – particularly
population groups in difficult circumstances, which are well known to prove particularly sceptical over Europe – perceive Europe and how these perceptions coincide with medially communicated images of Europe.

Researchers: Prof. Dr. Uwe Hasebrink (contact person), Anja Herzog, Talke Klara Hoppmann, Dr. Claudia Lampert, Jutta Popp

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Overview on all projects in this area