News avoidance and the effect on the informed citizenry in democratic society

The last decade the amount of people that avoids the news is growing. With this PhD research project we try to understand why people avoid the news, how they do it and who they are. Consequently we look at the effects of news avoidance on well-being, participation and knowledge. The project consists of six studies. The first is an exploratory study to understand the multi-faceted concept by doing a Delphi-study amongst experts from the journalistic field (2020). The second is a three wave panel study during the Covid crisis to understand news consumption and avoidance over time and its effect on well-being and participation (2021). The third is a Latent Profile Analysis of news avoiders in order to profile the different types of news avoidance (2022). The fourth study is an in-depth interview study amongst news avoiders to understand news avoidance in daily life (2023). The fourth study will be an experience sampling method, where we track news avoiders information behavior and measure their knowledge on political and current affairs (2023). The last study will be a critical review on how to research hard to reach audiences (2024). The project will be finished in October 2024.