ABSTRACT
This chapter is a must-read for everyone interested in learning about the different scientific methods to investigate media discourses about and public attitudes toward migration in Europe used for the different chapters in this book. The chapter does not focus on technical details. Instead, it describes the methods in more general terms, for readers less familiar with them. In short, we applied online survey methodology to assess public attitudes. Automated text analysis was the method of choice to study media discourses. To examine media effects, we relied on experiments as well as a combination of data collected through automated text analysis and surveys. Furthermore, this chapter also describes the datasets which were used for the analyses in this book. The text, survey, and experiment datasets were collected in six European Union member states, namely Germany, Hungary, Poland, Spain, Sweden, and the UK. Setting up our methodical approaches was not free from challenges. To the interested reader and scholars who plan cross-national research on migration attitudes, media discourse and media effects, the concluding paragraphs might provide thought-provoking impulses.
