Giving and Taking Advice between Self Improvement and external Improvement. Empirical Reconstructions of the Production and Reception of Advice Media

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Ulf Sauerbrey
• Subject Area: General Education and History of Education
• Term: from 2020 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 445185102

• Final Report Year: 2024

Final Report Abstract

Advice media have become an integral part of popular culture in modern societies. As media that can be distinguished from purely informative or entertaining offerings, advice media address specific questions, possible problems or deficits and offer those seeking advice and others potentially interested in a topic the prospect of immediate help and improvement of their respective situation. As 'informal' forms of counseling, they are often low-threshold, convey knowledge in specific media forms and encourage their users to act. However, unlike professionspecific counseling, advice media often originate from non-professional contexts. Over the course of three years and at four working conferences, as well as in a task force that dealt with research methods and ethics, the network researched popular advice media from various perspectives. The basic aim was to record the subjective perspectives and use of the recipients (taking advice) as well as the o9ers of the producers (giving advice) in order to expand the state of research with empirical findings on advice media, especially for parents, teachers, children and teenagers. The utilization perspective in the network was supplemented by the use of advice media by early education professionals. Six members of the academic network presented interim results of the network's work at the 2022 congress of the German Society for Educational Science at the University of Bremen in a symposium entitled "Entgrenztes Wissen? Pädagogische Ratgeber im Fokus der Erziehungswissenschaft". The working group that developed from the network published a special issue of the journal "Bausteine Forschungsdatenmanagement" in 2023. In 2024, an anthology with contributions from the network members was published under the title "Empirische Ratgeberforschung. Forschungszugänge und Befunde zu Produktion, Angebot und Inanspruchnahme ratgeberhafter Medien" was published. Several individual publications in specialist journals and anthologies complete the results of the overall project. The network has developed original research approaches and theories on advice media. On the side of offering, numerous analyses of advice media for parents, teachers and children were analyzed - including book-based advice media in particular, but also parents' online forums, blogs and Instagram. On the utilization side, both the motives for selecting and the use of advice media by children, parents and early education professionals were examined. In the process of the network's work, it quickly emerged that despite the change in the media formats of advice media in the 20th and 21st centuries, there are some similarities to traditional advice books. Three studies in the network, which examined advice books from the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, provided evidence of this. As a result, it was possible to develop a proposal to understand various media formats that encourage action as advice media. The network has made a fundamental contribution to the further development of an emerging field of social science research in terms of the number of empirical research studies, the subject matter in the context of advice media and its identification characteristics, as well as with regard to methodological findings.

Publications

• Mediale Optimierung der Kindheit?. MedienPädagogik: Zeitschrift für Theorie und Praxis der Medienbildung, 42, 199-216.
  Sauerbrey, Ulf & Schick, Claudia
  
• Pädagogische Rezepte und pädagogische Rezeptkritik. Vierteljahrsschrift für wissenschaftliche Pädagogik, 98(2), 217-231.
  Krüger, Jens Oliver
  
• Ratgeberforschung in der Erziehungswissenschaft – Stand, Kritik und Perspektiven. Gedanken zu den Beiträgen dieses Heftes. Bildung und Erziehung, 75(3), 337-350.
  Großkopf, Steffen
  
• Wann ist ein Text ein ‚Ratgeber‘? Methodische Anmerkungen für eine mediensensitive linguistische Ratgeberforschung, in: Hennig, M., Niemann, R. (Hrsg.): Ratgeben in der spätmodernen Gesellschaft. Ansätze einer linguistischen Ratgeberforschung, Tübingen: Stau9enburg, 97–129.
  Ott, C.
  
• Wie zeigt sich Zeigen? Sprachhandlungsbasierte Annäherungen an das Pädagogische in Bildungsmedien – Ratgeber, Lehrbuch und Schulbuch kontrastiv. Bildung und Erziehung, 75(3), 280-298.
  Ott, Christine
  
• Besonderheiten des Forschungsdatenmanagements im Kontext von Untersuchungen zu Prozessen des Ratsuchens, Ratgebens und Ratnehmens in Online-Foren, in: Bausteine Forschungsdatenmanagement, (4), 1–11.
  Hemmerich, F. & Ruge, W. B.
  
• Das DFG-Netzwerk „Ratgeben und Ratnehmen“: Ein Zwischen- und Erfahrungsbericht, in: Bausteine Forschungsdatenmanagement, (4), 1–11.
  Sauerbrey, U., Großkopf, S. & Vidal, N.
  
• Optimierte Familienerziehung?. Vierteljahrsschrift für wissenschaftliche Pädagogik, 62-77.
  Sauerbrey, Ulf; Schick, Claudia & Andreeva, Liubov
  
• „Zwischen den Stühlen“. Spannungsfelder des Datenmanagements im Kontext multidisziplinärer Wissenschaftszweige am Beispiel der Ratgeber-Forschung, in: Bausteine Forschungsdatenmanagement, (4), 1–20.
  Homann, N.
  
• Empirische Ratgeberforschung. Forschungszugänge und Befunde zu Produktion, Angebot und Inanspruchnahme ratgeberhafter Medien. Verlag Julius Klinkhardt.
  Sauerbrey, Ulf; Großkopf, Steffen & Ott, Christine (Eds.)