Dr. Johannes Bleher assists researchers from TU Dortmund University by conducting machine learning-based analysis of German PIRLS data, specifically using post-selection regressions on principal components derived from multiple imputed and bootstrapped datasets.

The study examines how vital social resources, more precisely social interactions with peers and teachers, are for two central aspects of school success, namely academic achievement and well-being. To this end, the representative German PIRLS 2016 data of 3959 fourth-grade students (MAge = 10.34 years; N = 1,940 girls, 71% white) were analyzed. Social interactions were operationalized using factors indicating whether students experienced bullying from peers, and how much teacher support they perceived. We found that fewer bullying experiences and more perceived teacher support were positively related to academic achievement and enjoyment of school as a prominent aspect of school-related well-being. Applying machine-learning methods to avoid overfitting while including important control variables, only the effects of bullying experiences and perceived teacher support on well-being remained robust. The results underlined that positive relationship experiences were particularly important for students’ well-being but not necessarily incremental to students’ academic achievement.

Jan Dvorak develops a taxonomy of audience participation during political scandals on Twitter for the special issue "Scandals in a Global Context".

The prevalence of politicians’ scandals on social media has become an integral part of contemporary political life, presenting a challenge to existing scandal research. The formerly passive audience is given new opportunities for participation that have not yet been comprehensively described either theoretically or empirically. This study contributes to filling this gap by developing a taxonomy to describe offensive and defensive forms of audience participation during scandals. The study analyzes a sample of 500 influential tweets, taken from a corpus of more than 55.000 tweets related to two scandalizations of German politicians.

Tobias Schrimpf, Jan Dvorak, Andreas Reich und Prof. Dr. Jens Vogelgesang beschäftigen sich im aktuellen M&K-Themenheft mit der Kommunikationsstruktur und Protestaufrufen der "Querdenken"-Bewegung.

Anhand einer quantitativen Netzwerkanalyse untersuchen die Autoren die Struktur geteilter Inhalte der "Querdenken"-Bewegung auf Telegram. Hierzu analysieren sie insgesamt 9.088.629 Nachrichten aus 943 Kanälen und Gruppen. Im Netzwerk identifizieren sie zentrale Akteure wie den Kanal "@haintz". Ortsnennungen in Protestaufrufen zeigen weiter, dass die Bewegung vor allem in Ballungszentren wie Berlin und Stuttgart mobilisiert. Jedoch lässt sich auch ein Mobilisierungstrend hin zu Mittel- und Kleinstädten erkennen.

In dem Paper unterstützt Jan Dvorak das Team an der Universität Tübingen dabei, Aktivitätsmodelle für Amseln über das Jahr hinweg zu modellieren.

Die Studie beleuchtet das Verhalten von Turdus Merula und beobachtete die Vogelart mit Hilfe von Wildkameras über ein ganzes Jahr hinweg. Die so erlangten Daten wurden verwendet, um ein Aktivitätsmodell der Vogelart zu erstellen. Hier zeigten sich signifikante Unterschiede zwischen dem Verhalten im Frühling, wo Amseln einen unimodalen Tagesrhythmus aufweisen, und dem Rest des Jahres, der einem bimodalen Rhythmus entsprach.