Johannes Breuer

GESIS - Leibniz-Institute for the Social Sciences | GESIS · Survey Data Curation

While survey research has been at the heart of social science for decades and social scientific research with digital trace data has been growing rapidly in the last few years, until now, there are relatively few studies that combine these two data types. This may be surprising given the potential of linking surveys and digital trace data, but at t...

Research has prominently assumed that social media and web portals that aggregate news restrict the diversity of content that users are exposed to by tailoring news diets toward the users’ preferences. In our empirical test of this argument, we apply a random-effects within–between model to two large representative datasets of individual web browsi...

Combining surveys and digital trace data can enhance the analytic potential of both data types. We present two studies that examine factors influencing data sharing behaviour of survey respondents for different types of digital trace data: Facebook, Twitter, Spotify and health app data. Across those data types, we compared the relative impact of fo...

Although other social media platforms have seen a steeper increase in users recently, Facebook is still the social networking site with the largest number of users worldwide. A large number of studies from the social and behavioral sciences have investigated the antecedents, types, and consequences of its use. In addition or as an alternative to se...

Research on news exposure has shown that while political knowledge and interest largely determine the degree of active engagement with online news, some people are generally less willing to invest into actively staying informed. Instead, these people report to pursue a passive mode of relying on specific sources, such as social media, based on the...

Several researchers have questioned the reliability of pornography research's findings. Following a recent call to use more reliable data sources, we conducted two analyses to investigate patterns and predictors of online pornography use (OPU). Our analyses were based on data from a large-scale German online web tracking panel (N = 3018) gathered f...

In recent years, a growing number of initiatives in communication and media research have advocated for a “cultural shift” in our discipline toward more open, reproducible, and replicable research practices and better access to infrastructures and shared research resources (cf. Bowman and Spence 2020; Dienlin et al. 2021; Haim and Puschmann 2023; S...

Social media data (SMD) have become an important data source in the social sciences. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the experiences and practices of researchers working with SMD in their research and gain insights into researchers' sharing behavior and influencing factors for their decisions. To achieve these aims, we conducted a surve...

Forschung wird zunehmend aus Sicht ihrer Ergebnisse gedacht – nicht zuletzt aufgrund der Umwälzungen im System Wissensschaft. Der Band lenkt den Fokus jedoch auf diejenigen Prozesse, die Forschungsergebnisse erst ermöglichen und Wissenschaft konturieren. Dabei ist der Titel Doing Research als Verweis darauf zu verstehen, dass forschendes Handeln vo...

Forschung wird zunehmend aus Sicht ihrer Ergebnisse gedacht - nicht zuletzt aufgrund der Umwälzungen im System Wissensschaft. Der Band lenkt den Fokus jedoch auf diejenigen Prozesse, die Forschungsergebnisse erst ermöglichen und Wissenschaft konturieren. Dabei ist der Titel Doing Research als Verweis darauf zu verstehen, dass forschendes Handeln vo...

The COVID-19 pandemic has been accompanied by intense debates about the role of the information environment. On the one hand, citizens learn from public information campaigns and news coverage and supposedly adjust their behaviours accordingly; on the other, there are fears of widespread misinformation and its detrimental effects. Analyzing the pos...

Privacy is a hotly debated topic in academia and society. The digitalization of our world has had enormous implications for our privacy. Some researchers and public figures agree that privacy has changed substantially, that we are living in a post-privacy world, and that we need to address privacy differently. Conversely, others maintain that priva...

This chapter provides an overview of content-analytical research on video games. We introduce existing and emerging constructs commonly studied in content analyses of video games (e.g., violence, sexism), review methodological challenges, and discuss how research so far has dealt with them. We also offer suggestions for future directions for conten...

Given the high importance of Web use in day-to-day life, understanding and predicting Web browsing behavior are important endeavors for academic as well as commercial research. We propose that routines – behaviors that are performed regularly (activation) and in similar ways (execution) – can be used to describe underlying structures in Web use and...

Several researchers have questioned the reliability of pornography research’s findings as they may, e.g., be biased by social desirability. Following a recent call to make use of more reliable data sources, we conducted two studies to investigate patterns and differences as well as predictors of online pornography use (OPU). In our first study, we...

Privacy is a hotly debated topic in academia and society. The digitalization of our world has had enormous implications for privacy. Many researchers and public figures agree that privacy has changed substantially, that we are living in a post-privacy world, and that we need to address privacy differently. Others maintain that privacy remains a rel...

Online intermediaries such as social network sites or search engines are playing an increasingly central role in democracy by acting as mediators between information producers and citizens. Academic and public commentators have raised persistent concerns that algorithmic recommender systems would negatively affect the provision of political informa...

This study examines the gender and country differences with respect to a range of gaming motivations (e.g., social, performance, habit) and game genre choices (e.g., action, sports, casual). Surveys were conducted on 634 university students from Singapore, Germany and the US. Overall, the findings suggest that many game motivations and genre choice...

For most people, telework during the COVID-19 pandemic necessitates the increased use of digital tools. Although working from home can enhance flexibility, it comes with various psychological challenges, all of which can be substantially exacerbated for people during the COVID-19 pandemic. The increased need to use digital tools can create cognitiv...

Testing is an effective learning method, and it is the basis of mobile quiz apps. Quiz apps have the potential to facilitate remote and self-regulated learning. In this context, automatized feedback plays a crucial role. In two experimental studies, we examined the effects of two feedback types of quiz apps on performance, namely, the standard corr...

Social Media gewinnen im privaten, schulischen und beruflichen Leben zunehmend an Bedeutung. Die besonderen Formen sozialer Interaktion und speziell auch die Daten, die diese generieren, eröffnen neue Einblicke und innovative Forschungsfragen für die Bildungsforschung. Die vorliegende Handreichung thematisiert verschiedene Zugangswege zu Social-Med...

Linking social media data with survey data is a way to combine the unique strengths and address some of the respective limitations of these two data types. As such linked data can be quite disclosive and potentially sensitive, it is important that researchers obtain informed consent from the individuals whose data are being linked. When formulating...

The role of information exposure during the COVID-19 pandemic seems ambiguous, as gains in knowledge from public information campaigns stand against fears of widespread misinformation, especially via social media. Using data from a large survey collected during the first COVID-19 wave in March 2020 as well as data from Facebook, this paper investig...

Combining surveys and digital trace data can enhance the analytic potential of both data types. We present two studies on factors influencing data sharing behavior for different types of digital trace data: Facebook, Twitter, Spotify, and health app data. Across those data types, we compare the relative impact of five factors on data sharing: data...

In the last 10 years, many canonical findings in the social sciences appear unreliable. This so-called “replication crisis” has spurred calls for open science practices, which aim to increase the reproducibility, replicability, and generalizability of findings. Communication research is subject to many of the same challenges that have caused low re...

Recent research by Taneja et al. suggested that digital infrastructures diminish the generational gap in news use by counteracting preference structures. We expand on this seminal work by arguing that an infrastructural perspective requires overcoming limitations of highly aggregated web tracking data used in prior research. We analyze the individu...

Forschungsdaten sind das primäre Produkt empirischer Studien und die zentrale Grundlage wissenschaftlicher Erkenntnis. Ihre langfristige Sicherung und Bereitstellung zur intersubjektiven Nachvollziehbarkeit und damit zur Qualitätssicherung sollte daher in allen wissenschaftlichen Disziplinen unterstützt werden. Entsprechend hat die Deutsche Forschu...

Dieser Beitrag untersucht, inwiefern ein digitales Quizspiel in (hoch)schulischen Unterrichtskontexten eine lernförderliche Wirkung entfalten kann und welche Rolle dabei verschiedene Arten des Feedbacks spielen. In einer experimentellen Studie zeigte sich ein Lerneffekt unabhängig von der Feedbackart. Die Ergebnisse legen nahe, dass digitale Quizsp...

The ubiquity of digital devices and the increasing intensity of users’ interactions with them create vast amounts of digital trace data. Companies use these data to optimize their services or products, but these data are also of interest to researchers studying human behavior. As most of these data are owned by private companies and their collectio...

The rise of new technologies and platforms, such as mobile devices and streaming services, has substantially changed the media entertainment landscape and continues to do so. Since its subject of study is changing constantly and rapidly, research on media entertainment has to be quick to adapt. This need to quickly react and adapt not only relates...

To what extent are research results influenced by subjective decisions that scientists make as they design studies? Fifteen research teams independently designed studies to answer five original research questions related to moral judgments, negotiations, and implicit cognition. Participants from two separate large samples (total N > 15,000) were th...

Der Einsatz von Serious Games in der Gesundheitskommunikation stößt sowohl bei Praktikerinnen und Praktikern als auch Forscherinnen und Forschern in jüngster Zeit vermehrt auf Interesse. Mittlerweile gibt es zahlreiche Spiele, die entwickelt oder eingesetzt werden, um gesundheitsbezogenes Wissen, Einstellungen und Verhalten zu beeinflussen, und min...

Previous research has shown that users of social network sites designed for professional purposes, such as LinkedIn, report higher professional informational benefits than nonusers. However, this effect could only be partly explained by social media use as there was also a selection effect, such that people who have more informational benefits were...

Background Health is one of the most important application areas for Serious Games (i.e., games with a purposed beyond entertainment), and Serious Games are an important tool for digital health communication and education. Objectives What are the overall findings regarding Serious Games for Health? For which applications and goals are Serious Game...

Retro gaming and the renaissance of past video games has been an emerging area of interest for media research within the past years. Yet, there is little empirical research trying to explain the psychological effects and benefits of past-related gaming. This article explores how remembering of past video game experiences relates to nostalgia, a mix...

Recent studies have found that digital games can be used to improve the players’ mood, especially after emotionally unpleasant experiences. We introduce competence repair as an extension of previous work on mood repair. To investigate the effects of digital games on both mood and competence repair, we conducted 3 studies using quiz games. In the qu...

Both collected anecdotal evidence from video game players and the results of academic studies have shown that sexism is an issue in video game culture. More specifically, sexism has been found to be common in two areas: (1) video game content and (2) interactions between players in online games. While it might seem logical to assume that these two...

The credibility of scientific claims depends upon the transparency of the research products upon which they are based (e.g., study protocols, data, materials, and analysis scripts). As psychology navigates a period of unprecedented introspection, user-friendly tools and services that support open science have flourished. However, the plethora of de...

This article conceptually integrates research on the experience of nostalgia—defined as a predominantly positive, social, and past-oriented emotion—into the fold of video game research. We emphasize the role of nostalgia as an explanation for contemporary retro gaming trends, and suggest that nostalgia towards gaming events is a necessary area of r...

The credibility of scientific claims depends upon the transparency of the research products upon which they are based (e.g., study protocols, data, materials, and analysis scripts). As psychology navigates a period of unprecedented introspection, user-friendly tools and services that support open science have flourished. There has never been a bett...

Frustration–aggression theory, more commonly known as the frustration–aggression hypothesis, ranks among the most seminal and prolific theories in research on aggression. From its beginnings in the late 1930s until today, it has been applied and studied in a variety of areas, including clinical and social psychology, ethnology, sociology, criminolo...

R is a programming language and a freely available open-source software environment for statistical analyses and graphics (see http://www.r-project.org/). Besides being free and open-source, R has recently seen a surge in popularity mainly for its graphical capabilities for producing publication-ready tables and figures, and its functionalities for...

As an entertainment technology, video games are a popular social activity that can allow for multiple players to cooperatively engage on-screen challenges. Emerging research has found that when people play together, the resulting teamwork can have beneficial impacts on their prosocial orientations after gameplay–especially when the players are coop...

As an entertainment technology, video games are a popular social activity that can allow for multiple players to cooperatively engage on-screen challenges. Emerging research has found that when people play together, the resulting teamwork can have beneficial impacts on their prosocial orientations after gameplay–especially when the players are coop...

Hate Speech kommt nicht nur in sozialen Netzwerken oder den Kommentarfeldern von Nachrichtenseiten vor. Auch in Computerspielen, die über das Internet gespielt werden (Online Games), ist Hate Speech weit verbreitet. Ziele von Hate Speech in Online Games sind häufig Frauen oder Minderheiten. Während die Erscheinungsformen und Motive prinzipiell die...

Existing work on the effects of social network sites (SNS) on well-being has often stressed that SNS can help people gain social support from their online networks, which positively affects their well-being. However, the majority of studies in this area have been cross-sectional in nature and/or relied on student samples. Using data from six waves...

Research examining online games often focuses on their potential to negatively impact players. One of the most common concerns is that playing online with others can displace offline relationships and, consequently, detrimentally affect one’s level of “offline” social support. However, there has been little empirical evidence supporting these causa...

Researchers interested in motives for playing digital games can draw on a variety of measurement instruments. When the aim is to compare between groups, however, instruments need to show certain psychometric properties. Specifically, an instrument needs to be invariant. Without such properties, comparisons between groups run the danger of yielding...

Using data from four waves of a longitudinal study among Dutch internet users, we examined whether and how the use of social network sites (SNS) for professional purposes is related to informational benefits. Building on a social capital framework and taking into account the affordances of social media, we specifically looked at users' activities a...

From the oversexualized characters in fighting games, such as Dead or Alive or Ninja Gaiden, to the overuse of the damsel in distress trope in popular titles, such as the Super Mario series, the under- and misrepresentation of females in video games has been well documented in several content analyses. Cultivation theory suggests that long-term exp...

Longitudinal studies investigating the relationship of aggression and violent video games are still scarce. Most of the previous studies focused on children or younger adolescents and relied on convenience samples. This paper presents data from a 1-year longitudinal study of N = 276 video game players aged 14 to 21 drawn from a representative sampl...

Macht Gewalt in Computerspielen aggressiv? Die Kontroverse um die Wirkung von Gewalt in Computerspielen beschäftigt Wissenschaft und Öffentlichkeit seit über 25 Jahren. Trotzdem ist die Befundlage weiterhin uneinheitlich. Verantwortlich sind dafür neben methodischen Problemen auch ideologische Überzeugungen der Beteiligten. In unserem Überblicksart...

Most of the studies on violence in digital games have investigated its effects on arousal or aggression. Little attention has been paid to how in-game violence is actually perceived and evaluated. To investigate this issue we conducted two experimental studies (N = 30 and N = 74) in which participants either played or watched a violent shooter game...

Recent research has attempted to describe meaningful experiences with entertainment media that go beyond hedonic enjoyment. Most of this research focuses on noninteractive media, such as film and television. When applied to digital games, however, such research needs to account for not only the content of the medium, but also the unique dimensions...

Cross-sectional studies on video game violence and aggression have yielded contradictory results. Parts of this inconclusiveness can be attributed to the limitation to particular age groups. The present study investigated the relationship between preference for action and first-person shooter (FPS) games and aggression for the groups of adolescents...

Most studies investigating the effects of violence in digital games on aggression and physiological arousal feature two groups of participants either playing a violent or a nonviolent game. However, violent content is usually not the only dimension on which the games used in these studies differ. This raises the issue of possibly confounding variab...

The impact of video game play on player aggression continues to be debated within the academic literature. Most of the studies in this area have focused on game content as the independent variable, whereas the social context of gaming is largely neglected. This article presents an experimental study (N = 76) on the effects of game outcome and trash...

The Competitive Reaction Time Task (CRTT) is the measure of aggressive behavior most commonly used in laboratory research. However, the test has been criticized for issues in standardization because there are many different test procedures and at least 13 variants to calculate a score for aggressive behavior. We compared the different published ana...

Digital games are among the most complex forms of media entertainment. They contain a large variety of multimodal sensory stimuli, from vivid three-dimensional graphics to engaging sound effects and background music, elaborate narratives, and absorbing virtual worlds. Games are also highly dynamic, meaning that they usually do not follow a linear s...