Projects

The current crises – such as the climate crisis – require collective efforts by society to mitigate their consequences. While a large part of the population supports these efforts and respective measures, there are also social groups that are developing alternative norms of opposition to measures, as the Covid-19 crisis has recently shown.

The project aims to understand opposition to norms of risk mitigation in the context of the climate crisis. It therefore introduces the notion of alternative norms – norms of measure non-compliance, critique, and protest – and interrogates the role of alternative media in the formation of such norms.The specific aims of the project are to 

(1) describe the prevalence of alternative media use and norms in the population; 
(2) identify differences between traditional and alternative media in their coverage of norms regarding the climate crisis; and 
(3) analyse the relationship between the use of (alternative) news media and the development of (alternative) norms within the population.

The project will combine a three-wave survey in the German-speaking part of Switzerland with a content analysis (manual and AI-based) of German-speaking traditional and alternative news media. The survey and content data will be linked to analyse the relationship between the use of news media and the formation of norms regarding the climate crisis. The content analysis will be conducted in cooperation with the Research Center for the Public Sphere and Society and the Linguistic Research Infrastructure at UZH.

The results will add a nuanced understanding of the process of norm formation in times of crisis by disentangling influences of traditional and alternative media in different societal groups. These findings are more relevant than ever given that humanity is facing multiple severe crises that require a tremendous collective effort to mitigate a global polycrisis.

Core team

PD Dr. Sarah Geber            Dr. Janine N. Blessing

Project partner

Prof. Dr. Mike Schäfer   Prof. Dr. Gerold Schneider  Dr. Daniel Vogler 
 

Runtime: 2024-2027

Funding: Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF)

Total funds: 470,000 CHF
 

Geber, S. (2024). Unraveling the dark side of social norms—Toward a research agenda on the challenges of social norms in health communication. Health Communication, 39(12), 2955–2962. https://doi.org/10.1080/10410236.2023.2296190