News consumption and immigration attitudes: a mixed methods approach

Existing research has shown that the media can influence public attitudes to immigration. While existing research provides insight into both quantitative and qualitative patterns of media coverage of immigration, research that links such coverage with audience attitudes is almost exclusively quantitative, often focused on the west, and are often single-country studies. We argue that the adoption of a mixed-methods approach to audiences of immigration news, combined with a comparative design and a focus on Eastern Europe – a region scoring lowest in the world in terms of migrant acceptance – can bring significant advances to knowledge in this area, leading to a more rounded understanding of how media come to shape immigration attitudes. To demonstrate this, we draw on a comparative, mixed-methods data set comprising representative population surveys (N=4,092), an expert survey (N=60), and qualitative interviews (N=120) conducted in four Eastern European countries. In contrast to existing research on Western Europe, we found significant variation in the links between attitudes to immigration and use of Public Service Media (PSM), with PSM consumption linked with more negative attitudes to immigration in some countries, and with more positive attitudes in others. Second, our results confirm that different attitudes to immigration are embedded in different qualitative understandings of immigration: while participants with more positive attitudes often adopted a more inclusive understanding of immigration, those with more negative attitudes adopted a narrower understanding. Third, we demonstrated the importance of family and acquaintances as trusted sources of information.