Welcome! We (Alice Binder, Jörg Matthes, Marko Bachl & Emese Domahidi) are organising the upcoming 2021 conference of the Methods Division of the German Communication Association (DGPuK). Due to the pandemic COVID-19, this conference will be held entirely online.

The Zoom channels for both conference days as well as for the division meeting are now available.

➥  Zoom Channel for Conference Day 1 • Meeting-ID: 913 9090 2489 • Code: 786724

➥  Zoom Channel for Conference Day 2 • Meeting-ID: 912 0421 7701 • Code: 610425

➥  Zoom Channel: Fachgruppensitzung • Meeting-ID: 962 8345 8052 • Code: 864640

The registration for the conference is now up and running – please note that participating is free of charge. To proceed with your registration, please click here.

Starting today, papers can now be submitted through our Conference Administration Tool. To proceed and submit your papers, please check here.

The pandemic has generated enormous research endeavors from all scientific disciplines including the social sciences. In the field of communication, researchers studied, for instance, the diverse effects of the crisis with respect to social media and smartphone use (e.g., Huckins et al., 2020; Ellis et al., 2020), online misinformation (e.g., van der Linden et al., 2020), media exposure and psychological effects of the pandemic (e.g., Garfin et al., 2020), or communication strategies and health behaviors (e.g., Muselli et al., 2021). Besides influencing the topics of communication research, the pandemic has also led to significant changes in how we do research, as for instance, regarding our research settings as well as methods (Gruber et al., 2021), our research environments, our standards and procedures, or the interaction between researchers. Against this background, the overall question of this call is "How does COVID-19 affect communication research?".

The online conference aims to address this question in all its possible facets and dimensions. More specifically, the call for papers is open to diverse perspectives regarding how the pandemic has affected research designs, settings, instruments, standards, logics, or productivity. This involves, but is not limited to, the development of new data collection procedures, measures, or analysis techniques as well as the various ways in which research has been conducted during the pandemic covering issues such as gender diversity, research ethics, participant health, research productivity, quality and rigor, lab designs, or issues related to replicability, open science, and meta-science.

We also welcome submissions focusing on methodological questions relating to research on communication and COVID-19. The call is open to all epistemological perspectives. In addition to the conference topic, there is also an "Open Call".