By Siobhan Holohan
Can you help with this research project?
The 'Muslims in the European Mediascape' Research Project funded by The Institute for Strategic Dialogue in partnership with the Vodafone Foundation Germany and the British Council aims to explore the complexity of media production and consumption in an ever-more diverse Europe. The research is being led by two teams based in the UK (Dr Siobhan Holohan, Keele University and Dr Elizabeth Poole, Staffordshire University) and Germany (Professor Andreas Zick and Dr Jörg Heeren, Bielefeld University), and aims to identify relationships between social cohesion and trends in the use and production of media in view of key variables, including socio-economic background, education, gender, ethnicity, religion, generation, personal and private inter-cultural relationships, and age in the UK and Germany.
Having completed the first stage of the research – in-depth interviews with media producers from mainstream and ‘Muslim’ media organisations – we are now looking for participants for stage two which aims to identify the choices people make when it comes to the media they consume, and what impact those choices might have on inter-cultural social relations in the UK and Germany. The first part of this research is being conducted via a short online survey which can be found at http://www.unipark.de/uc/muslim-media-research. This version of the survey is specific to UK media consumers. However, we are looking for people from all cultural / ethnic / religious backgrounds and from as many walks of life as possible to participate in the survey. All views are valid. The survey should take no more than 10 minutes to complete and is anonymous. From this start we hope to build a picture of media consumption and attitudes toward inter-cultural relationships which can be furthered by qualitative media consumer focus groups at a later stage.
If you would like further information about this survey or the project as a whole please contact Dr Siobhan Holohan, s.holohan@keele.ac.uk or Dr Elizabeth Poole, e.poole@staffs.ac.uk.
