Volume 42, Issue 4

For the general public and for scientists, interpersonal political communication is highly important; however, surveys based on self-reports often lack satisfactory validity and reliability, because political talk is embedded in everyday conversations and thus hard to remember. Furthermore, different people are likely to ascribe different meanings to the term ‘politics’. The present paper aims to further our understanding of what people perceive or do not perceive as political. To determine the factors influencing the general public’s understanding of politics, we conducted a representative telephone survey among 804 citizens of a German city. The findings indicate that people’s classification of conversations as political is determined by the characteristics of the discussed issues. Furthermore, some respondents did not mention all conversations that might influence their political opinions and behavior. Nonetheless, the matter might be relevant for research when people are asked about their political conversation behavior.

Due to radical changes in media consumption, manifested in the widespread mediatization and proliferation of the uses of personal media in everyday life, research about media audiences can no longer focus on a single medium. In order to identify ideal-typical combinations of media platforms and aesthetic cultures in the population of the two largest Slovenian cities, the concept of media repertoires was used. The study shows that our respondents’s media consumption is structured into four typical media repertoires: integrators, digital natives, television viewers and newspaper readers. These four repertoires also represent distinct socio-cultural formations. In social terms, (digital) audiences therefore do not constitute a homogenous social community, but should be understood as class-differentiated discursive cultures or ‘meaning systems’.

The present study aims to illustrate the points of view of various female sports journalists as they relate the unique and defining experiences within their line of work, intending to identify the key elements at play in the shaping of the practice of women in sports journalism and its impact on the coverage of women’s sports. 17 Israeli female sports journalists were interviewed concurrently, alongside a select number of male editors of various sports sections. In addition, a survey regarding readers’ views on the coverage of women’s sports and a content analysis of sport coverage in national newspapers was conducted. The analysis of the study’s findings and, particularly, of the female sports journalists’ experiences, has even revealed similarities between the place of women in sports media and female presence within combative military units.

This study investigated whether conflictual information about novel medical findings in online newspaper articles affected laypeople’s perception of tentativeness, their attitude toward, and fear of, the medical procedure in question. For this purpose, we rated the user comments from all available online newspaper articles about Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS). Multilevel regressions revealed that higher levels of conflictual information in the articles were associated with higher levels of expressed tentativeness and a more negative attitude toward DBS expressed in the user comments. No significant relationship with expressed fear of DBS was found. We conclude that journalistic preparation and style is directly associated with readers’ perception of tentativeness and opinion formation and discuss suggestions for journalistic presentation of scientific information.

In (in)formal learning scenarios, individuals should develop epistemological beliefs (i.e., individual conceptions about the nature of knowledge and knowing) that are advantageous for understanding everyday science- and health-related information. To date, researchers measuring how to foster students’ discipline-specific epistemological beliefs have often tested researcher-designed texts in short-term interventions. Applying this logic to audio-visual stimuli, television clips might also affect (e.g., change) the epistemological beliefs of students. To test this assumption, three different television stimuli on the subject of Alzheimer’s disease with varying levels depicting the presented knowledge (as more advantageous, moderate, or less advantageous) were therefore selected by means of a content analysis, and their effects tested on a sample of 72 students using a pre-/post-test questionnaire. The results showed some partial support for the assumption that the epistemological beliefs of participants could become less advantageous when they are exposed to television clips depicting knowledge as moderate or less advantageous.