Digital skills among youth: A dataset from a three-wave longitudinal survey in six European countries.

This dataset provides longitudinal survey data from a European project, ySKILLS, which was focused on the role of digital skills in youths' development. It contains data from 10,821 participants from Grades 6-10 (in Wave 1) in Estonia, Finland, Germany, Italy, Poland, and Portugal. The data was collected between Spring 2021 and Spring 2023, the participants were recruited through schools, where the data collection also took place, except for online data collections due to restrictions caused by COVID-19. The dataset is novel in its multidimensional approach to the construct of digital literacy. It provides insight into the development of digital skills in youth and the role of digital skills and internet usage in youths' positive and negative online experiences and wellbeing. It also contains data that allows for the analysis of the role of digital skills in class networks. The data are beneficial for researchers interested in the examination of youths' online skills, internet usage, online experiences, and wellbeing from a longitudinal perspective.

[Books on Screen]. / Bücher am Bildschirm: Empirische Befunde zu Leseerfahrungen und Lesepraktiken mit digitalisierter Literatur.

With e­readers, smartphones, notebooks, and tablets, new reading media have emerged whose haptics, spatiality, visuality, and materiality differ fundamentally from those of the traditional book. Electronic reading devices are characterized by a range of different text representations and distinct associated reading practices. This article will address the question of the concrete practices of literary reading on screens and the specific literary reading experiences on the basis of a laboratory experiment (N=207), a focus group study (N=34), and a quota-based online survey (N=779). The synoptic evaluation of these three published studies shows that a praxeological perspective in particular can yield important insights for understanding the differences between reading printed books and e­books. The different material conditions of digitized and printed books result in different practices, both in terms of the quantity of what is read and the choice of text, the reading locations and reading situations, and the forms of acquisition and storage. However, both reading media fulfill different functions, go hand in hand with different reading practices, and complement rather than replace each other.

A window of opportunity? The relevance of the rotating European Union presidency in the public eye.

The rotating EU presidency's relevance for EU politics has decreased since the introduction of a permanent council president. However, news salience and framing of the own government acting as the EU presidency can amplify publicity for EU affairs. We, therefore, evaluate the visibility and framing of the EU presidency in 12 Austrian newspapers for 2009-2019. We conduct an automated text analysis of 22 presidencies over 11 years, testing several hypotheses statistically, and qualify results via manually coded frames of the Austrian EU presidency in 2018. The results confirm the crucial importance of the domestication of EU politics, underscoring the potential of the presidency to serve as a window of opportunity for public debate. We discuss our findings with reference to the EU's democratic deficit.

Experiencing literature on the e-reader: the effects of reading narrative texts on screen.

BACKGROUND: The digitalisation of literature is proliferating, and the increasing spread of digital reading devices and the availability of digital texts is likely to make books on screen a lasting phenomenon, but little attention has been paid to the consequences of digitalisation for the experience of narrative fiction. While on the one hand, reading literature on a digital reading device might trigger a superficial processing of the text, and problems regarding orientation within the narrative, the awareness of reading a literary text might, on the other hand, lead to more in-depth and complex processing, independent of reading medium. This study examines whether the reading performance and the emotional and cognitive experiences of the reception of a literary text vary between reading a printed book or an e-reader. METHODS: Using a between-subjects experimental design, 207 participants read the beginning of a novel either in a printed book or on an e-reader. They then completed a reading comprehension test and questionnaires about their cognitive and emotional experiences. RESULTS: Overall, the results do not suggest the clear superiority of either of the two reading media. Neither reading speed nor reading comprehension differed significantly between the two groups. Even though a broad range of reading experiences was measured, neither cognitive nor emotional reading experiences differed significantly between the groups. CONCLUSION: An e-reader does not affect either reading performance or cognitive and emotional experience of reading a narrative text, compared with a printed book.

Start Spreading the News: A Comparative Experiment on the Effects of Populist Communication on Political Engagement in Sixteen European Countries.

Although populist communication has become pervasive throughout Europe, many important questions on its political consequences remain unanswered. First, previous research has neglected the differential effects of populist communication on the Left and Right. Second, internationally comparative studies are missing. Finally, previous research mostly studied attitudinal outcomes, neglecting behavioral effects. To address these key issues, this paper draws on a unique, extensive, and comparative experiment in sixteen European countries (N = 15,412) to test the effects of populist communication on political engagement. The findings show that anti-elitist populism has the strongest mobilizing effects, and anti-immigrant messages have the strongest demobilizing effects. Moreover, national conditions such as the level of unemployment and the electoral success of the populist Left and Right condition the impact of populist communication. These findings provide important insights into the persuasiveness of populist messages spread throughout the European continent.

Content Analysis by the Crowd: Assessing the Usability of Crowdsourcing for Coding Latent Constructs.

Crowdsourcing platforms are commonly used for research in the humanities, social sciences and informatics, including the use of crowdworkers to annotate textual material or visuals. Utilizing two empirical studies, this article systematically assesses the potential of crowdcoding for less manifest contents of news texts, here focusing on political actor evaluations. Specifically, Study 1 compares the reliability and validity of crowdcoded data to that of manual content analyses; Study 2 proceeds to investigate the effects of material presentation, different types of coding instructions and answer option formats on data quality. We find that the performance of the crowd recommends crowdcoded data as a reliable and valid alternative to manually coded data, also for less manifest contents. While scale manipulations affected the results, minor modifications of the coding instructions or material presentation did not significantly influence data quality. In sum, crowdcoding appears a robust instrument to collect quantitative content data.