Since the start of the project, work has focused on (1) planning and designing empirical studies, (2) fielding several data collections, (3) theory development, conceptualization and literature review, as well as (4) writing, preparing and finalizing manuscripts. At the moment, the project has generated 16 peer-reviewed articles in scientific journals as well as several manuscripts still under review, plus two book chapters and a large number of conference papers.
With respect to empirical studies, the project has completed several data collections, including a long-term panel survey, several longitudinal event studies and experiments, as well as focus groups. All data collections are designed to address how citizens’ perceptions of societal problems develop over time and relate to news coverage and media use – focusing on issues such as antimicrobial resistance, climate change, crime, economy, education, European Union affairs, health care, and unemployment. The event-driven studies focus on climate change, the Covid-19 pandemic, and education. Experiments focus on antimicrobial resistance, climate change, crime and education.
Results from the project cover theoretical, methodological and empirical aspects. With respect to theory and conceptual developments, two journal articles – published in the Annals of the International Communication Association (Shehata et al., 2021) and Human Communication Research (Shehata et al., 2024) – provide distinct conceptualizations of media effect dynamics. With respect to methodological contributions, two articles – published in Journal of Communication (Thomas et al., 2021) and Human Communication Research (Shehata et al., 2024) – present and develop statistical approaches aimed at capturing more complex media effects dynamics. With respect to empirical findings, several publications provide important knowledge of how specific media effect dynamics actually operate over time. In sum, the findings illustrate that (1) beliefs about societal problems form and take shape relatively immediately in response to news coverage, that (2) individuals are sensitive to that the latest news frame they are exposed to but that (3) these framing effects dissipate quickly if people are not additionally exposed to a frame, that (4) cumulative and consonant news coverage can influence both the (5) maintenance and (6) reinforcement of beliefs over time, and that (7) individual-level factors such as ideology, media trust and interpersonal communication can both mediate and condition such effect dynamics.
