SCM Studies in Communication and Media

Although the quantitative content analysis is one of the most important methods in empirical social research, the coding process receives little attention. This is particularly concerning in light of current developments, such as the rise of the use...

Content analysis is one of the core methods of communication science. However, it is currently confronted with several challenges, such as the influx of procedures, data, and measurements emerging from computational methods. To understand how...

Automated content analyses have become a popular tool in communication sci- ence. While standard procedures for manual content analysis were established decades ago, it remains an open question whether these standards are sufficient for the use of...

Questions of validity and research ethics are closely linked, with content-analytic research being no exception. Nevertheless, in the past, quantitative content analysis has often been excluded from ethical discussions among communication scholars....

In quantitative content analysis, conventional wisdom holds that reliability, op- erationalized as agreement, is a necessary precondition for validity. Underlying this view is the assumption that there is a definite, unique way to correctly classify...

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the German population has become polarised and distrust in social institutions has grown. Despite generally high levels of trust in sci- ence, we have witnessed the emergence of science and COVID-19 sceptics, who are...

The paper investigates whether watching legal series leads to law school enroll- ment. First, the study analyses if series consumption is related to enrolling at law school. This is achieved by analyzing data of 1,353 students from Münster,...

“Suspense is when it’s suspenseful.” For many years this sentence coined the (German) empirical research on suspense. Post-receptive measurement instruments usually understood suspense as one-dimensional or as a subdimension of other...

Political social media influencers (PSMI), who as personal brands regularly dis- seminate self-produced political content on platforms such as YouTube, Instagram and TikTok, can influence the political public and opinion formation beyond their...

Young adults with cancer are particularly challenged to manage their disease. On the one hand, they have to consider the various (long-term) side effects of the therapy, and on the other hand – because their problem is not typical for their age...

In the first half of the year 2020, images of the COVID-19 pandemic dominated frontpages and primetime news: empty streets, overcrowded hospitals and panic-buying reflected the chaos and great uncertainty of this global health crisis. Since the...

Freedom of speech is one of the most fundamental human rights in modern democracies. On the one hand, it enables individual personal development and the formation of opinions. On the other hand, it is central to the functioning of democratic...

Self-tracking technologies have been regarded both very optimistic and very critical. However, these conclusions are often based on single application studies and lack empirical evidence on actual self-tracking usage. We set out to identify types of...

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, conspiracy beliefs about the virus spread quickly. Using an online-representative survey in Germany, this study examines the relationship between such conspiracy beliefs and media use with special regard to...

As a result of the digitalization of corporate communications, the professional figure of the social media manager (SMM) has emerged in recent years. This paper aims to examine the emergence of this figure within the established structure of...

Media trust is under threat in many countries, and mistrust in mainstream media and discussions about “fake news” have increased in recent years. Critical attitudes toward the media can be a potential danger for society; therefore, it is crucial...

Since its emergence in the 1960s, virtual reality (VR) has generated significant enthusiasm among researchers and practitioners, as well as technology and media companies. In journalistic practice, however, VR has so far only been able to compete to...

Journalism is crucial to modern democracies in that it provides valid knowledge about current events in the form of news. Through shared epistemic standards and the professional norm of objectivity, journalism helps to generate societal knowledge...

Social norms messages may motivate COVID-19 preventive behaviors, such as getting vaccinated. To date, however, the research has mainly focused on the established concept of static norms and widely ignored the potential of dynamic norms. Dynamic...

This study investigates the comparative prevalence of information avoidance concerning the coronavirus and its relationship with media evaluation and use. We argue that information avoidance is a behavior that broadly signifies the intermittent and...