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ABSTRACT
In today’s convergent media environment, media exposure becomes increasingly channel-independent and social media-bound, and media content is more frequently accessed on mobile devices. This calls for new approaches to measuring media exposure. This study applies an innovative approach to survey (n = 2378) exposure to political information in the form of a mobile diary measurement, accessible via a specifically developed app. Respondents exhibited broad acceptance and uptake of the mobile measurement, resulting in an almost representative sample and equally satisfactory application of different platform modes. The study furthermore confirms limitations of mere usage time measurements of social media platforms in effects research and explores a range of actual content types that citizens encounter in social networks. It recommends more frequent use of mobile exposure measurements and argues for a content-related assessment of social media use in effects research.
Acknowledgments
The app used in this study was developed with the help of Filip Wallberg, University of Southern Denmark.
Notes
1 Audio refers to listening to the radio online and offline as well as using other audio sources on and outside the Internet, e.g., listening to music, audio books and sources. Page refers to print media like newspapers or magazines, books and all written media content found online. Stream corresponds to offline TV usage and other audiovisual exposure outside the Internet as well as every use of moving images online.
2 In Denmark, 90% of all citizens between age 16 and 65 own a mobile media device (Emarketer, Citation2014).
3 According to Meeker and Wu (Citation2013) smartphone owners check their phone 100–150 times a day.
4 The pollster recruits panelists on several hundred Danish webpages (Baker et al., Citation2010; Pfeiffer & Garrett, Citation2014). Panelists represent the Danish population on the basis of age, gender, education, occupation, and region, compared to census data.
5 Chi-square goodness-of-fit tests were used to test for sample differences between main (N = 9125) and mobile sample (n = 2378) regarding gender (n.s.), income (n.s.), age (60–79 age group underrepresented by 6.1%, p < .000), mobile internet use (heavy users underrepresented by 2.5%; p < .024) and political interest (low interested underrepresented by 3.6%; p < .000).