Media representations of refugees, asylum seekers and immigrants: a meta-analysis of research

ABSTRACT

Media representation of refugees, asylum seekers, and immigrants has emerged as an important area of research. This study offers a systematic overview of the objects and key characteristics of the field. We analyse 119 scholarly articles collected from the EBSCO database. Our results show that research activity has increased dramatically since 2010. However, this increase was not equally distributed; countries that have received the largest numbers of refugees were often among the least studied. Qualitative approaches outnumbered quantitative approaches, and print rather than TV or online outlets remained the preferred media type. Analysis shows an utter lack of research outside the European and North American contexts and highlights the need for more comparative and longitudinal studies.

KEYWORDS:

• Asylum-seekers
• immigrants
• media representation
• meta-analysis
• migration
• news media
• refugees

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).