The Covid-19 pandemic has thrust scientists and science explainers into the public eye. Although we may think of their presence in the media as something new, popularization has in fact been part of science since there has been science. Today’s scientists who go on talk shows, record podcasts, or fight …
In another GESIS blog post, Steffen Pötzschke and Bernd Weiß have provide some information on their recent survey that used Facebook and Instagram to reach Germans abroad. In this text we present preliminary findings on the characteristics of the participants and see how they fared during the COVID-19 pandemic. In …
Migration research faces many methodological challenges. This is already true when the focus is on newcomers (immigrants) in a single or a small number of countries. A major difficulty in this regard is finding, contacting, and convincing members of the target population to participate. But what if we would even …
Soziale Medien und Suchmaschinen – sogenannte Intermediäre – befördern den individuellen Nachrichtenkonsum und die Vielfalt der Nachrichtenquellen. Zu diesem Ergebnis kommt eine aktuelle Studie der GESIS-Wissenschaftler Sebastian Stier und Johannes Breuer gemeinsam mit Michael Scharkow von der Johannes Gutenberg Universität Mainz und Frank Mangold von der Universität Hohenheim – und …
Dr. Fabian Flöck presents a new state of the art for inferring demographic attributes of social media profiles with deep learning in 32 languages. In a paper from last year he showed with colleagues how to estimate the probabilities to be on Twitter for different socio-demographic strata in over 1000 …
Here’s what we learned from 8 political ‘astroturfing’ campaigns. Dr. Sebastian Stier and his co-authors Franziska Keller, David Schoch, and JungHwan Yang examine so called “astroturfing” campaigns which aim at misleading the public by giving a false impression that there is genuine grass-roots support or opposition for a particular group …