Erhard, L., Heiberger, R. H., & Windzio, M. (2021). Diverse Effects of Mass Media on Concerns about Immigration: New Evidence from Germany, 2001–2016.
European Sociological Review.
https://doi.org/10.1093/esr/jcab063 Abstract
Media discourse is often seen as an important condition of people’s attitudes and perceptions. Despite a rich literature, however, it is not well understood how media exposure influences attitudes towards immigrants. In contrast to previous studies, we argue that people rely on ‘availability heuristics’ shaped by mass media. From that point of view, it is the specific content of media discourse on immigration that affects people’s concerns. We use structural topic models to classify media content of more than 24,000 articles of leading German newspapers from 2001 to 2016. Utilizing linear fixed-effects models allows us to relate a person’s concern towards immigration, as reported in the German Socioeconomic Panel, to prevalent topics discussed in print media while controlling for several confounding factors (e.g., party preferences, interest in politics, etc.). We find a robust relationship between topic salience and attitudes towards integration. Our results reveal that specific topics with negative contents (e.g., domestic violence) increase concerns, while others (e.g., scientific studies, soccer) decrease concerns substantially, underlining the importance of available information provided by media. In addition, people with higher education are generally less affected by media salience of topics.BibTeX
Wieczorek, O., Unger, S., Riebling, J., Erhard, L., Koß, C., & Heiberger, R. (2021). Mapping the field of psychology: Trends in research topics 1995–2015.
Scientometrics.
https://doi.org/10/gk7x93 Abstract
We map the topic structure of psychology utilizing a sample of over 500,000 abstracts of research articles and conference proceedings spanning two decades (1995–2015). To do so, we apply structural topic models to examine three research questions: (i) What are the discipline’s most prevalent research topics? (ii) How did the scientific discourse in psychology change over the last decades, especially since the advent of neurosciences? (iii) And was this change carried by high impact (HI) or less prestigious journals? Our results reveal that topics related to natural sciences are trending, while their ’counterparts’ leaning to humanities are declining in popularity. Those trends are even more pronounced in the leading outlets of the field. Furthermore, our findings indicate a continued interest in methodological topics accompanied by the ascent of neurosciences and related methods and technologies (e.g. fMRI’s). At the same time, other established approaches (e.g. psychoanalysis) become less popular and indicate a relative decline of topics related to the social sciences and the humanities.BibTeX
