SCM Studies in Communication and Media

In recent years, the number of users on online physician rating sites has increased continuously. According to exemplification theory, user comments have a strong influence on individual judgments. Visualized base-rate information can constrain...

User discussions of journalistic online news are a sensitive issue. First, most users do not seem to be motivated to comment on articles. Second, as far as discussions emerge, they seldom aim to create mutual understanding. Since this threatens the...

Newsrooms are still searching for ways to manage user comments because of both a desire for professional distance from their audiences and a lack of analytical tools. This paper presents findings from our exploratory, interdisciplinary study in...

Uncivil and impolite user comments diminish the quality of deliberative discussions in the comment sections of news sites. This study investigates how users engage against such comments. Replying, disliking, and flagging are distinguished as...

This article develops a model to explain contradictory findings on the effects of repeated exposure to persuasive communication. The model’s starting point is the repetition frequency of a given stimulus. This determines - in interaction with...

On the basis of four focus group discussions (N = 32) that were conducted in June 2015, the present study investigates the attribution and assessment of corporate responsibility by citizens. To obtain more differentiated insight into the attribution...

On contemporary online news sites, readers are simultaneously exposed to journalistic articles and social reactions toward these messages. Two online experiments (N = 252) addressed whether negative user reactions can attenuate the persuasive...

Beginning in summer 2015, the increasing number of refugees coming to Europe and the question of how to handle this challenge has ignited a heated public debate in many European countries. In Germany, public discourse has become progressively...

Exemplification research has consistently shown that after reading news reports including individual cases, people tend to base their judgments on these so-called exemplars. Until today, it is not entirely clear why exemplars are so powerful in...

The mobile phone appropriation (MPA) scale, originally developed in German, was translated into and adapted to English and initially validated through a confirmatory factory analysis (CFA) in this study. First, the theoretical background of the MPA...

First- and second-level digital divides are of great concern in health communication research and practice. It is feared that the increased importance of online health information might also increase informational inequalities between those who can...

Convenience samples have been a substantial driver of empirical social research for decades. Undergraduate students are still the researchers’ favorite subjects, but the importance of respondents recruited on the Internet is on the rise. This...

The (participatory) opportunities provided by interactive features on news sites have been widely theorized and investigated in recent years. However, user comments’ effects on the perception of journalistic quality have only begun to be examined....