@article{2026:zerrer:beyond_the,
title = {Beyond the Black Box: A Multimodal Approach to Understanding In-App Communication},
year = {2026},
note = {Mobile devices are increasingly central as sources of up-to-date
information, making the precise recording of information behavior on
these devices more relevant for research. Established methods of
automated data collection are reaching their limits when capturing
in-app communication, such as political content within social media
applications. Based on two case studies, we present two approaches
that enable the identification of exposure to relevant content and, to
some extent, the collection of in-app content. The first case study
focuses on identifying relevant exposure across different apps on a
mobile device using app tracking and screen recordings. The second
case study focuses on linking exposure to seen content and deriving
respective content features to obtain an enriched dataset. We discuss
the advantages and limitations of both approaches and present
conceptual frameworks for processing and analyzing such data.},
journal = {M&K Medien & Kommunikationswissenschaft},
pages = {31--51},
author = {Zerrer, Patrick and Pressmann, Paul and Puschmann, Cornelius and Krieter, Philipp},
volume = {74},
number = {1}
}