Procrastination, Distress and Life Satisfaction across the Age Range – A German Representative Community Study

Addressing the lack of population-based data the purpose of this representative study was to assess procrastination and its associations with distress and life satisfaction across the life span. A representative German community sample (1,350 women; 1,177 men) between the ages of 14 and 95 years was examined by the short form of the General Procrastination Scale (GPS-K; 1) and standardized scales of perceived stress, depression, anxiety, fatigue and life satisfaction. As hypothesized, procrastination was highest in the youngest cohort (14-29 years). Only in the youngest and most procrastinating cohort (aged 14 to 29 years), men procrastinated more than women. As we had further hypothesized,…

Conceptualizing Online Discussion Value: A Multidimensional Framework for Analyzing User Comments on Mass-Media Websites

This chapter provides a micro-framework for analyzing the quantity and quality of online user comments on mass-media websites. On one dimension, news factors of news items and discussion factors of existing user comments are assumed to indicate the relevance of participating in online discussions. On a second dimension, specific motivational, social, and design factors are influential when reconstructing users’ decisions to participate in online discussions and when analyzing the content of online user comments. The two dimensions in combination describe the discussion value of news items. Potential applications of this framework on other forms of interpersonal communication are discussed.

Supplementary_appendix – Supplemental material for Sleeper effect from below: Long-term effects of source credibility and user comments on the persuasiveness of news articles

Supplemental material, Supplementary_appendix for Sleeper effect from below: Long-term effects of source credibility and user comments on the persuasiveness of news articles by Dominique Heinbach and Marc Ziegele in New Media & Society

Soziale Marktwirtschaft zwischen freiem Spiel der Marktkräfte und Staatsintervention

Im Jahreswirtschaftsbericht 2009 des Bundesministeriums fur Wirtschaft und Technologie (BMWi) ist zum Thema Staatsinterventionen nachzulesen: „Um die Einlagen der Burger und die Kreditversorgung der Unternehmen zu sichern sowie das Vertrauen in die Stabilitat des Finanzsystems wiederherzustellen, waren Regierungen und Zentralbanken weltweit zu Interventionen gezwungen“ (BMWi 2009e, S. 3; Hervorhebung durch den Verfasser).

Digital Stress over the Life Span: The Effects of Communication Load and Internet Multitasking on Perceived Stress and Psychological Health Impairments in a German Probability Sample

The present study investigated the psychological health effects and motivational origins of digital stress based on a representative survey of 1,557 German Internet users between 14 and 85 years of age. Communication load resulting from private e-mails and social media messages as well as Internet multitasking were positively related to perceived stress and had significant indirect effects on burnout, depression, and anxiety. Perceived social pressure and the fear of missing out on information and social interaction were key drivers of communication load and Internet multitasking. Age significantly moderated the health effects of digital stress as well as the motivational drivers of communi…

Is It Really That Funny? Laughter, Emotional Contagion, and Heuristic Processing During Shared Media Use

ABSTRACTWhen people use humorous media content, their behavior and assessments of the content may depend on the emotional expressions (e.g., laughter) of those around them. In a laboratory experiment in which 80 participants watched a movie clip with a confederate who either laughed or remained silent, we identified two parallel processes. The confederate’s laughter induced behavioral responses in our participants (laughing or smiling). Through those responses, a corresponding appraisal of the media content was generated: The content was rated funnier in comparison to situations in which the confederate did not laugh. This effect corresponds to emotional contagion processes and was especial…

Communication, Cohesion, and Corona: The Impact of People’s Use of Different Information Sources on their Sense of Societal Cohesion in Times of Crises

Solidarity among society is considered crucial to tackle the corona pandemic. With the crisis evoking a high need for orientation, the information people obtain from different sources may shape whe...

Insights Into Aspects Behind Internet-Related Disorders in Adolescents: The Interplay of Personality and Symptoms of Adjustment Disorders

Abstract Purpose Problematic Internet use (PIU) that has recently been referred to as Internet-related disorder is a growing health concern. Yet, it is unclear why some adolescents are developing problematic use, whereas others sustain control. Based on previous research, we hypothesize that personality traits (low conscientiousness and high neuroticism) act as predispositions for PIU. We further hypothesize that PIU can be understood as a maladaptive reaction toward critical life events and that these maladaptive reactions are exacerbated by dysfunctional personality traits. Methods The study investigates the prevalence of distinct subtypes of PIU among a sample of adolescents (n = 1,489; …

Outfit oder Output?

Nicht nur bei der Prasentation gros angelegter Forschungsprojekte stehen Hochschullehrerinnen und -lehrer verstarkt im Fokus der Offentlichkeit und des interessierten Fachpublikums. Gerade vor dem Hintergrund des zunehmenden Evaluierungsdrucks in der Lehre mussen sie sich auch regelmasig der kritischen Beurteilung durch die Studierenden stellen. Der Ruf, den die Wissenschaftlerinnen und Wissenschaftler bei Studierenden geniesen, konnte dabei masgeblich sowohl von ihrer wissenschaftlichen Reputation als auch von ihrem auseren Auftreten abhangen. In einem Fragebogenexperiment mit 154 Studierenden verschiedener Fachbereiche geht die vorliegende Studie am Beispiel der Merkmale „Kleidungsstil“ u…

The dynamics of online news discussions: effects of news articles and reader comments on users’ involvement, willingness to participate, and the civility of their contributions

ABSTRACTThis study investigates when and why news website visitors write civil or uncivil comments in response to news articles or related user comments. In an experiment, we manipulated the news value of news articles and the presence of ‘deliberative’ or ‘detrimental’ elements of comments to compare their impact on participants’ involvement, willingness to comment, and the comments they posted. News factors and comment characteristics increased participants’ willingness to comment via cognitive and affective involvement. Cognitive involvement made it less likely and affective involvement more likely that participants wrote uncivil comments. Additionally, involvement with previous comments…

What Creates Interactivity in Online News Discussions? An Exploratory Analysis of Discussion Factors in User Comments on News Items

While the social, political, and journalistic relevance of user comments on online news items has been discussed intensively, no study has tried to examine why some online news discussions are more interactive than others. Based on the rationale of news value theory, this study argues that so-called discussion factors in user comments indicate general relevance to later users to respond to them. Qualitative interviews with users who comment on news stories online and a quantitative content analysis of 1,580 user comments showed that the discussion factors uncertainty, controversy, comprehensibility, negativity, and personalization can explain interactivity in news discussions. Further, diff…

Between idiosyncratic self-interests and professional standards: A contribution to the understanding of participatory journalism in Web 2.0. Results from an online survey in Germany

Not much is known about participatory journalists in Germany or further afield. We conducted a standardized quantitative online survey of participatory journalists at the German-language website myheimat, a German-based hyperlocal participatory journalism portal with about 37,000 contributors (as at September 2010). The purpose of the survey was to examine the individual characteristics of participatory journalists (sociodemographics, expertise, qualification and gender aspects). The survey also explored why they write articles for myheimat (societal/individual motivations), what they think about their role and function as grassroots journalists (identity/self-concept), what they know and …

Media Effects on Positive and Negative Learning

While educational science in the past mainly focused on students’ formal or intentional learning from courses, textbooks, or online tutorials in university contexts, communication science usually deals with ordinary citizens’ informal or unintentional learning from the mass media in everyday life. One of the general aims of the PLATO project is to bring these research traditions together. Therefore, this paper sums up research on media effects on positive and negative learning recently conducted; our studies show that media coverage is often biased and news media, therefore, contribute to negative as well as positive learning. Which kind of learning occurs, heavily depends on the way inform…

I Want a Savior, Not a Victim. The Impact of Media Representations of the EU and Economic Shocks on Citizens’ Supportive Attitudes on the European Integration

The impact of communicating digital technologies: How information and communication technology journalists conceptualize their influence on the audience and the industry

Information technology is ever-changing. Information and communication technology (ICT) journalists play a significant part in diffusing, explaining and interpreting these new technologies and in forging the societal understanding of future trends, influencing both their audience and the developers they cover. They are important gatekeepers and their coverage is – most likely – decisive for the success or failure of new products. To explore this function of ICT journalism, an online survey of 102 ICT journalists in Germany was conducted, including 32 journalists in managing roles. This study focuses on two research questions: (a) how do ICT journalists perceive their relationship to and the…

Sleeper effect from below: Long-term effects of source credibility and user comments on the persuasiveness of news articles

User comments on news websites are a controversial element of online communication. Various studies have reported the negative effects of comments criticizing the related news articles on readers’ attitudes toward the issues described in these articles. However, these findings are mostly based on measurements directly after the reception of comments. No research has investigated the long-term effects of comments on readers’ article-related attitudes and compared them with the effects of cues emanating from the articles themselves. Therefore, this study transferred the sleeper effect in persuasion to news sites with comment sections. In a 2 × 2-experiment, the persuasiveness of an article w…

Frame Competition After Key Events: A Longitudinal Study of Media Framing of Economic Policy After the Lehman Brothers Bankruptcy 2008–2009

Die Berichterstattung zu staatlichen Eingriffen im Kontext der Wirtschaftskrise

Ziel dieses Kapitels ist es, einen ersten Eindruck von der Berichterstattung uber staatliche Eingriffe im Kontext der Wirtschaftskrise zu vermitteln. Hier wird insbesondere nachvollzogen, welche Aufmerksamkeit die untersuchten Medien staatlichen Interventionsmasnahmen schenkten und wie sich die Entwicklung der Berichterstattung uber das erste Krisenjahr hin erklaren lasst.

Permanently online and permanently procrastinating? The mediating role of Internet use for the effects of trait procrastination on psychological health and well-being

A growing number of studies suggest that Internet users frequently utilize online media as “tools for procrastination.” This study thus investigated the relationship between trait procrastination, Internet use, and psychological well-being in a representative sample of N = 1,577 German Internet users. The results revealed that trait procrastination was associated with an increased use of leisure-related online content and impaired control over Internet use. As a result, Internet users high in trait procrastination showed a higher risk of experiencing negative consequence of Internet use in other life domains. These negative repercussions of insufficiently self-regulated Internet use partia…

Linking News Value Theory With Online Deliberation: How News Factors and Illustration Factors in News Articles Affect the Deliberative Quality of User Discussions in SNS’ Comment Sections

Previous research suggests that distinct characteristics of news articles, such as their news factors, account for the different participation rates in comment sections as well as the degree of interactivity among the discussants. In this study, this assumption is tested in the Facebook environment and extended to the analysis of how news factors (i.e., event characteristics) and illustration factors (i.e., characteristics resulting from a specific journalistic editing) of news articles predict the inclusiveness of discussions, as well as the occurrence of civility, rationality, and deliberative interactivity in user comments. A content analysis of 619 news articles and 11,218 related user…

What People Make of Social Capital Online: An Empirical Study on the Conversion of Social Capital via Networking Sites

Social capital is considered an important aspect of online social networks and the idea that it can be converted into other forms of capital, is central to the capital concept. Examples of such a conversion are finding a job or obtaining information faster than others. However, the conversion and, therefore, the relevance of online social capital have not been sufficiently researched. Results from an online survey conducted on three German SNS indicate large interpersonal differences in the effectiveness of social capital conversion. They are best explained by the amount of available social capital and active investments in social capital, i.e., networking. Surprisingly, demographic attribu…

Privacy in Social Network Sites

Are we running out of privacy? Nowadays, for example, we are concerned about whether the maintenance of a private sphere in online environments has become a luxury commodity (Papacharissi 2009). Questions of this kind are justified as online communication plays an increasingly important role in people’s everyday life (cf., e.g., Lundby 2009). While it seems exaggerated to stigmatize today’s youth as “communication junkies” (Patalong 2010), online conversations are increasingly becoming a functional equivalent to face to face communication (Beer 2008). However, some significant differences between online and “offline” communication remain. Face to face communication may remain largely intima…

Automatically Detecting Incivility in Online Discussions of News Media

Detecting biased language in written discourse is a highly relevant area of research in political communication and other social sciences, given the large quantity of information exchanged in public online platforms. In this abstract, we discuss an approach based on the concept of "incivility"-assessing biased text on the Facebook pages of established news media. News outlets are forced to put increasing efforts into preventing heated debates from turning into disrespectful discussions on their social media platforms. By scaling the analysis from a few thousand manually coded samples to more than a million comments, we take a step towards supporting media outlets in (semi-)automatizing the …

Investigating label suggestions for opinion mining in German Covid-19 social media

This work investigates the use of interactively updated label suggestions to improve upon the efficiency of gathering annotations on the task of opinion mining in German Covid-19 social media data. We develop guidelines to conduct a controlled annotation study with social science students and find that suggestions from a model trained on a small, expert-annotated dataset already lead to a substantial improvement - in terms of inter-annotator agreement(+.14 Fleiss' $\kappa$) and annotation quality - compared to students that do not receive any label suggestions. We further find that label suggestions from interactively trained models do not lead to an improvement over suggestions from a stat…

The Press Coverage of Celebrity Suicide and the Development of Suicide Frequencies in Germany

The existence of the so-called "Werther effect" is well confirmed, and there are several recommendations on how the media should (not) report suicide to minimize the risk of copycat behavior. Unfortunately, very little is known about how suicide is actually reported. The article examines the German press coverage of six celebrity suicides with respect to compliance with guidelines on suicide reporting and analyzes changes in suicides in the wake of the reporting. It concludes that German media do not respect the recommendations in a substantial number of their articles. In addition, a significant increase in suicides and similar suicides is found.

What do users associate with ‘interactivity’?

‘Interactivity’ was one of the major buzzwords of the 1990s. Although the academic discourse has produced a large number of different concepts of ‘interactivity’, in everyday life it still remains a label put on all kinds of aspects of online communication and digital media. Drawing on schema theory this article explores the concepts of ‘ordinary’ users (i.e. people who are not professional experts). The results indicate that users associate the foremost social and individual issues with the term ‘interactivity’, i.e. what they can accomplish by using media in terms of self-development, social influence and social relationships.

A Cross-Cultural Perspective on the Privacy Calculus

The “privacy calculus” approach to studying online privacy implies that willingness to engage in disclosures on social network sites (SNSs) depends on evaluation of the resulting risks and benefits. In this article, we propose that cultural factors influence the perception of privacy risks and social gratifications. Based on survey data collected from participants from five countries (Germany [ n = 740], the Netherlands [ n = 89], the United Kingdom [ n = 67], the United States [ n = 489], and China [ n = 165]), we successfully replicated the privacy calculus. Furthermore, we found that culture plays an important role: As expected, people from cultures ranking high in individualism found i…

Between Usefulness and Legitimacy

We argue that during the financial crisis, economic news served as a dominant source of information for the public and as an influential factor in legitimating economic policy. We analyze (1) how German news broadcasts treated governmental intervention during the crisis and (2) selected effects on public opinion. Drawing on results from a content analysis of television news broadcasts ( n = 980), we show that governmental intervention was covered substantially, focusing on fiscal measures. To investigate possible effects of the news coverage, we conducted an online experiment with subjects differing in their degree of involvement with the consequences of the crisis ( n = 293). A news artic…

Construct Validity and Population-Based Norms of the German Brief Resilience Scale (BRS).

Abstract. The Brief Resilience Scale (BRS) measures the ability to recover from stress. To provide further evidence for construct validity of the German BRS and to determine population-based norms, a large sample (N = 1,128) representative of the German adult population completed a survey including the BRS and instruments measuring perceived stress and the resilience factors optimism, self-efficacy, and locus of control. Confirmatory factor analyses showed best model fit for a five-factor model differentiating the ability to recover from stress from the three resilience factors. On the basis of latent and manifest correlations, convergent and discriminant validity of the BRS were fair to g…

Online-Appendix-2 – Supplemental material for Linking News Value Theory With Online Deliberation: How News Factors and Illustration Factors in News Articles Affect the Deliberative Quality of User Discussions in SNS’ Comment Sections

Supplemental material, Online-Appendix-2 for Linking News Value Theory With Online Deliberation: How News Factors and Illustration Factors in News Articles Affect the Deliberative Quality of User Discussions in SNS’ Comment Sections by Marc Ziegele, Oliver Quiring, Katharina Esau and Dennis Friess in Communication Research

„Das wird man doch noch sagen dürfen…“ – Wahrgenommene Sprechverbote und ihre Korrelate

Die Aufregung ist gros und relativ unabhangig von der politischen Couleur der Aufgeregten: Am 21.10.2019 verhindern Demonstranten eine Lesung des ehemaligen Bundesinnenministers Thomas de Maiziere beim Literaturherbst in Gottingen. Diese wird spater unter Polizeischutz nachgeholt. AfD-Grundungsmitglied Bernd Lucke kann seine Vorlesung zur Makrookonomik II erst nach mehrfachen Anlaufen im Herbst 2019 an der Universitat Hamburg tatsachlich halten.

The interplay of intrinsic need satisfaction and Facebook specific motives in explaining addictive behavior on Facebook

We conducted an online survey with 581 SNS users.We developed a scale measuring SNS addiction.SNS specific motives mediate the effect of intrinsic needs on SNS addiction.People try to compensate thwarted intrinsic needs with gratifications from SNS use.Gratifications sought from SNS use can cause addictive SNS usage patterns. The present paper aims at exploring the new phenomenon of social network site (SNS) addiction and at identifying predictors of problematic SNS use. For this purpose, a scale measuring addictive behavior specifically with regard to SNS use was developed. The effects of intrinsic need satisfaction in the offline context and of SNS-specific motives on SNS addiction were t…

Gewinner und Verlierer der Krise

Die bisherigen Kapitel haben sich im Schwerpunkt mit den grundlegenden thematischen und zeitlichen Strukturen der Berichterstattung zu staatlichen Eingriffen auseinandergesetzt.

Staatliche Gegenmaßnahmen und ihre Bewertung in Medien und Bevölkerung

Im vorangegangenen Kapitel ging es darum, die grundlegende Struktur der Berichterstattung uber staatliche Eingriffe und insbesondere ihre zeitliche Dynamik herauszuarbeiten.