Intervention - (Newsroom) Reaction - Prevention? Effects of Media Guidelines for Responsible Suicide Reporting on the Media Coverage of Suicides in German Newspapers

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Hans-Bernd Brosius, since 11/2018
• Subject Area: Communication Sciences
• Term: from 2017 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 387230728

Suicide prevention is a global imperative. As the media are pivotal for suicide prevention, research determined several factors within media coverage on suicides that are likely to contribute to individual suicidality, such as prominent, detailed, repetitive, sensationalist, romanticizing, or glorifying suicide reports-especially for already vulnerable individuals (Werther-effect). On the other hand, latest findings suggest that media coverage on suicides can be suicide-preventive, too (Papageno-Effect). These suicide-preventive articles include explanations for the causes of suicide, or show ways how to cope with suicidal crises. Clearly, journalists play a key role for suicide prevention. Worldwide guidelines on appropriate suicide reporting acknowledge this fact especially by including aspects that help journalists to avoid including harmful elements in their suicide stories. Hence, this project focuses on an important research gap: Surprisingly, there is scarcely any research on how journalists integrate media guidelines on suicide reporting in their work life. Yet, there is almost no empirical research on how journalists perceive these guidelines, or how they are implemented in everyday working routines. Most existing studies apply combinations of a regional focus and/or use unstandardized codebooks that make it impossible to compare results between studies and/or do not ask journalists directly about how the professionals themselves perceive the guidelines (e.g. acceptance, reactance) or how they implement them in their work. Therefore, this project explores the influence of an awareness-intervention in different forms of presentation about appropriate suicide reporting: What attitudes do journalists have towards suicide and suicide reporting? Is there a de facto change in suicide reporting over time? Which factors influence positive-preventive changes? To do so, the project combines a standardized content analysis of the suicide coverage of German newspapers and a survey of journalists. The content analysis focuses over the course of 18 months, whether and how suicide reporting improves after the two newsroom interventions with a time lag of 6 months. Since the intervention is embedded within a web-based survey, we are able to draw a detailed picture of how German journalists perceive the intervention and how the intervention influences media coverage on suicides over time. However, we will also understand more about individual journalistic factors for its success. In the end, all newsrooms will obtain the awareness materials to improve suicide coverage in the German press.Using this design, the project is beyond basal scientific knowledge gains and reaches out to directly impact society: Responsible suicide reporting helps to save lives, every day.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Ehemalige Antragsteller: Dr. Florian Arendt, from 11/2017 until 11/2018; Professor Dr. Sebastian Scherr, until 11/2017