SCM Studies in Communication and Media

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....

While there has been a broad debate on the use of theory in history in general, there are few contributions by historians of communication and the media discussing the role of theory in their particular field. We therefore review and discuss some of...

The aim of this paper is to analyze the impact of the diffusion of the Internet on audience fragmentation in Germany. Fragmentation is defined in terms of a declining probability that an individual will find like-minded others who are concerned...

While most right-wing populist parties use negative political ads that openly attack foreigners and immigrants, some have begun to frame their campaigns more positively. This study examines the 2013 poster campaign on ‘brotherly love’ by the...

This article reviews the empirical research literature on campaign and media effects on vote choice at national elections in European countries for the post-World War II period. Particular efforts are undertaken to obtain a comprehensive picture by...

Young people’s political participation is essential for an effective democracy and sustainable society. Particularly news exposure has been demonstrated to leverage political participation. However, it is suggested with this paper that not only...

Results of opinion polls are used frequently in the press and media users rely on them in order to form an opinion or to make a decision. Sometimes, the reliability of polls can be questioned. This study examines the relative impact of source and...