Analysing the media repertoires that Swiss expatriates use to inform themselves about their heritage country

ABSTRACT

For people who migrate, the media are an important source of information about their heritage country. However, we know little about which media expatriates from wealthy countries like Switzerland use to inform themselves about their heritage country. Using data from a readership survey of the Swiss Revue, the official publication of the Organisation of the Swiss Abroad (OSA), we investigate the media consumption of Swiss expatriates. We identify five distinct media repertoires of Swiss expatriates when they inform themselves about their heritage country. How strongly individuals are connected to Switzerland correlates with the intensity of media consumption. We show that the less connected individuals are to Switzerland, the less they use the media for information about their heritage country. Specifically, expatriates who are registered as Swiss voters more often consult the media to follow events in Switzerland than individuals who are not eligible to vote.

KEYWORDS:

• Media repertoires
• immigrant media
• transnational media
• heritage country
• citizens abroad
• Switzerland

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Daniel Vogler

Dr. Daniel Vogler is the Research Director of the Research Center for the Public Sphere and Society (fög) at the University of Zurich and Research Associate at the Department of Communication and Media Research at the University of Zurich (IKMZ). His research focuses on public relations, journalism, online communication, and computational social science.

Jörg Schneider

Jörg Schneider is Research Associate at the Research Center for the Public Sphere and Society (fög) at the University of Zurich and business owner of the market research company js_studien+analysen. He holds a Masters degree in sociology from the Philipps-University in Marburg. His research focuses on media, communication, and reputation research. Another focus of his scientific work is on qualitative and quantitative methods of empirical social research.