Project Details
Projekt
The Mediatized Home (III): Contrasting Household Studies on Drivers of Dynamic Mediatization
Applicant
Professorin Dr. Jutta Röser
Subject Area
Communication Sciences
Term
from 2010 to 2017
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 181737221
The aim of the proposed project is to analyze how particularly dynamic processes of digital mediatization are initiated within the home. This research interest builds upon insights from the previous projects. A qualitative panel study with three examination periods (2008, 2011, and 2013) based on a sample of 25 couple households, systematically allocated by quota according to socio-demographic criteria, has already been conducted in order to grasp the changes of the mediatized home in a longitudinal analysis over six years. At the core of each examination phase were household studies in the form of qualitative, ethnographically oriented interviews.On the one hand, we were able to show how the Internet, in the course of its domestication, has been further integrated into everyday life at home and how this was followed, between 2008 and 2014, by on-going changes and a profound mediatization of the couple's communication cultures as well as their everyday practices. On the other hand, however, in spite of all differences in detail, mediatization has come as a gradual transformation rather than a revolution; it has not crystallized in an all-encompassing digitization of media use, but in the co-existence of older and newer media within the media repertoires of the couples, as was reflected in our present sample. These findings have resulted in the theoretical understanding that mediatization contains both moments of dynamics and moments of persistence in the social use of media. Against this background, the new project aims, first, at identifying and analyzing indicators for dynamics as well as persistence in the domestic mediatization process. For this purpose, a concluding evaluation based on our extensive material of the systematic panel study 2008-2014 is planned. While specifically taking gender relations into consideration, the results will shed light on the promoters and inhibitors of digital participation.The second objective is to learn more about the driving forces of domestic mediatization and therefor broaden the data basis. Envisaged is a discrete empirical study with couple households that are yet to be recruited. These new households shall be characteristic of a comprehensive mediatization and a special emphasis on the use of digital media technologies within the home; in this way, they are meant to represent a maximum contrast to the existing panel (in terms of grounded theory). The findings of this second part of the project seek to feed the theoretical debate about convergence and user-oriented ideas of convergence. Theoretically, the project relates to the concept of mediatization and to the domestication approach which has been further developed in the preceding projects with regard to participation and new digital media environments.
DFG Programme
Priority Programmes
