Volume 31, Issue 4

In the world of television-making, the media industry relies on measurements from a people-meter panel in order to find out how many people watch a certain program or commercial on television. A people-meter panel is a special-purpose panel in which the television-watching behavior of household members is measured using a special device attached to television sets. The measuring device can also register the television-watching behavior of guests to the panel homes. The reliability of estimates based on the people-meter panel primarily depends on the sample size. Due to the complexity of the sample design, the effective sample size cannot be determined straightforwardly. This is even more the case when one incorporates the viewing behavior of guests. This paper describes a methodology that determines effective sample sizes by computing design effects and which extends the methodology in such a way that it incorporates ‘guest viewing’.

Media use by ethnic minorities is increasingly becoming a politicized matter, appearing regularly in discussions on multiculturalism and integration. In a globalizing media-landscape, the rise of ethnic and global ethnic media paradoxically enables ethnic minorities to maintain links with forms of ethnic identity. Especially interesting in this respect is media use by adolescents, often on the crossroads between different cultures. This article departs from the notion concerned with the extent to which media use of adolescents from ethnic minorities actually differs from that of their Belgian counterparts, and instead focuses on the role ethnicity plays as a determinant of media use when weighed up against other socio-economic or education-related variables. Based on a large-scale Belgian survey of 12- to 18-year-olds, this article shows, amongst other results, that the importance of ethnic-cultural background as an indicator for media use by adolescents from ethnic minorities ought to be placed into perspective.

The number of journals in the field of communication is increasing. Above all, new, and more specialized journals geared to an international market, and therefore published in English, have appeared. In contrast to those journals, most national journals are still published in languages not accessible to the majority of communication scholars. How could national journals position themselves to survive? Our case study of 48 years of the leading German communication journal ‘Publizistik’ provides first insights into possible USPs of national communication journals.

This article discusses the benefits and limitations of collecting electronic data for large-scale thematic content analysis. We will discuss a number of methodological and technical issues. The first one is the construction of a list of relevant keywords that serves as the primary data collecting device. This is not only a technical necessity, but also secures a theoretically and empirically valid collection of data. The second concern is the quality of electronic archive information. Finally, source-specific data characteristics and coding difficulties are dealt with. In conclusion, seven guidelines for electronic data collecting are proposed.

The review essay deals with two recent publications on media-war relationships: Tumber and Palmer's ‘Media at war. The Iraq crisis’ (2004) and Thussu and Freedman's ‘War and the media. Reporting conflict 24/7’ (2003/2005). Two questions are raised in this essay. First, is it still relevant to look back at two publications on media-war relationships when (at least some of) the wars they focus on have fundamentally altered? And even more importantly, is there a convincing reason for actually reading them? Answering these questions allows for a more fundamental reflection on the importance of academic activities in relationship to issues of media and war. Three answers are suggested: the importance and necessity of documenting, analyzing and archiving war, the facilitation of academic and societal dialogue on the issues of war, and the analyses of the political, economical, cultural, technological and ideological contexts that transcend singular wars. Especially the last domain is considered crucial. Although each war is characterized by a high degree of specificity and contingency, which unavoidably influences and alters the media-war-military relationships, the contextual analyses enable uncovering the presence of more structural aspects in these relationships. More specifically, these contextual analyses teach us most about the role of power and ideology in the representational processes that deal with war. These analyses again show the powerlessness of media and media professionals to escape from the dichotomized ideological model of war and from the (direct or indirect) legitimization of what Knightley termed ‘the institution of war’.

Ayalon, A. (2004). Reading Palestine. Printing and literacy, 1900–1948 . Austin, TX: University of Texas. ISBN 0-292-70593-X (207 pp.) (John Nawas) McIntyre, L. J. (2005). Need to know. Social science research methods . Boston, MA: McGraw-Hill. ISBN 0-7674-1317-2 (303 pp.) (Dimitri Mortelmans) Schroeder, J. E. and Salzer-Mörling, M. (Ed.). (2006). Brand culture . London: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-35599-0 (paperback) (218 pp.) (Mario Pandelaere)