Flight in the media from the perspective of the population – a representative population survey

Epistemic interest and research question:

Narratives such as that of the "refugee crisis," but also that of the "lying press" have shaped public discourse in Germany since the summer of 2015. Today more than ever, flight and migration are not only political phenomena, they also determine the media agenda in the long term and thus also (in)directly influence the information situation in the population. In this tension field between traditional mass media and intermediaries such as Facebook, the social debate about flight and migration movements unfolds in a wide variety of contexts and different mass-media and interpersonal settings of the public sphere. Public opinion is formed and transformed in a complex interplay of existing attitudes, journalistic reporting (topics, quality, bias) and discourse on social networks, for example.

Methods:

representative online survey in Germany

Project duration:

ongoing, since 2019

Project design:

Against this background, a joint project of the ZFM with the TU Ilmenau and the University of Bern addresses the questions of how people inform themselves about the topic of flight and migration, what attitudes they represent, and how they evaluate the design of the refugee debate in the media. The third round of a representative online survey of the German population provides up-to-date findings in this regard and at the same time – due to the longitudinal design – offers the opportunity to examine changes in comparison to the years 2016 and 2017.

Project objective:

The aim of the joint project is to provide an overview of media usage behavior, both online and offline, on the refugee issue, taking a special look at how discussions in social media are evaluated. In addition, the surveyed attitudes towards refugees will form a focus area of the descriptive presentation under consideration of various interactions, for example, with political orientation or civic engagement.

Results:

• Presentation at the 65th Annual Conference of the DGPuK (March 11, 2020): "Stable statics. On unchanged attitudes towards refugees and (relative) lack of influence of media and social factors"
• Presentation at the 1st NeMiF Day (July 12, 2019): "Migration, Media, Opinions - The Media Discourse on the Issue of Refugees from the Perspective of the Population"
 

Internal project team:

Klaus-Dieter Altmeppen, Tanja Evers

External Project Team:

Dorothee Arlt (Universität Bern), Christina Schumann und Jens Wolling (TU Ilmenau)