ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts covered in the subsequent chapters of this book. The chapter identifies six basic assumptions of the agenda-setting theory, and reviewing numerous studies, concludes an online world although it requires substantial adjustments. Marcus Maurer and Corinna Oschatz discusses, the changes in the dissemination of political information and the process of political knowledge gain. This chapter focuses on description of a research program that aims to integrate the objective and subjective approaches. It deals with research designs in an online world. Keyling and Jakob Junger writes the observation of online content and provide orientation for researchers who are less experienced with data collection on the Internet, especially with data from social network sites. Silke Adam, Thomas Haussler, Hannah Schmid-Petri, and Ueli Reber discusses on hyperlink issue networks and explain snowballing techniques to obtain a network, understand the sociological meaning of hyperlinks, and methods of social network analysis to investigate hyperlink issue networks.
