Understanding Digital Media Effects

This post was first published on the Media@LSE blog. Digital media are neither poison nor cure Do digital media’s endless options for communication, information, and entertainment increase happiness? Or do constant availability and screens detract from “real life”? These are important questions, yet digital well-being is often framed simply as a technological challenge and an … Continue reading Understanding Digital Media Effects

How to Visualize Group Means in R

In the type of social science survey data I work with, there is often a continuous variable of interest and a couple of categorical grouping variables. The continuous outcome may be something like "percent who agree" or a composite score, e.g., a rating of something using multiple items. Let's generate some data df consisting of … Continue reading How to Visualize Group Means in R

Adolescents Across the World Face Online Hate and Violence

With global internet diffusion comes the risk of experiencing hate messages and seeing violent images – yet some high-connectivity countries do manage to maintain low exposure. Based on comparative analyses we ran in 2021 using as many countries as available from the Global Kids Online, EU Kids Online, and UNICEF Disrupting Harms projects, a new … Continue reading Adolescents Across the World Face Online Hate and Violence

The Birthday Problem Illustrated in R

In this episode of the Quantitude podcast, the hosts discuss the sometimes very unintuitive nature of probabilities. The well-known birthday problem asks what the probability is that any two people in a group have the same birthday. Obviously, this depends on the group size: if two randomly selected people meet, it's very unlikely that they … Continue reading The Birthday Problem Illustrated in R

The Desire to Disconnect and Expectations of Digital Availability

A Project on Digital Media Use in Everyday Life Initiated in 2020, this project has now concluded and resulted in two publications with co-authors Sarah Geber and Minh Hao Nguyen. Everyday disconnection experiences: Exploring people’s understanding of digital well-being and management of digital media use published open access in New Media & Society Abstract With … Continue reading The Desire to Disconnect and Expectations of Digital Availability

Knowledge and Well-Being in the Digital Society

[New preprint posted to SocArXiv] Has the internet made all the world’s knowledge universally accessible to everyone, anytime and anywhere? No. But access to knowledge has changed a lot since the 1990s. Ubiquitous digital media means people have developed new default ways of searching for information in everyday life, and there is a lack of … Continue reading Knowledge and Well-Being in the Digital Society

Citizenship, Bees, and Zucchini (ggplot2)

Opendata.swiss currently provides about 8000 open government data sets from agriculture to health to culture. Here, I'll be looking at a data set from the Federal Statistical Office containing the 500 most successful Swiss films by theater admissions. This post is mostly about preparing data for ggplot and customizing figures in R. You can download … Continue reading Citizenship, Bees, and Zucchini (ggplot2)

Media Technology Adoption in Europe

This post is inspired by the #tidytuesday CHAT data set and focuses on the diffusion and adoption rates of media technologies since 1992. Most interesting is probably the current data about internet users, whereas the statistics on radios, television sets, and newspaper circulation are only available up to about the year 2000. On the technical … Continue reading Media Technology Adoption in Europe