The study “Creatures of Habit? Explaining Pathways to Online News Use in the Context of Browsing Sessions“ will be presented at the
ECPR General Conference, which takes places from 22 to 25 August at Universität Hamburg.
Lisa Merten and
Dr. Cornelius Puschmann from the Hans-Bredow-Institut are co-authors of this study.
The study analyses the usage of online news. It is especially about the ways in which online users can access news content on the Internet. A browser plug-in was used to generate the data, which records the movements of the users in the network. This allows a better picture to be drawn of the different ways in which users find messages on the Internet: social media, search engines or directly on news websites. Finally, the recorded data can be correlated with other characteristics of the subjects, such as age, gender or political views.
The authors are currently in the phase of data processing and interpretation. Thus, there is no complete conclusion at the moment. However, it already shows that the participants in the study overestimated social networks as a guide to online news.
