TY - CONF TI - A critical realist approach to mediatization research AU - Lepa, Steffen T2 - "Mediatization & New Media". International Research Workshop by ECREA TWG Mediatization AB - The presentation advocates a methodological approach to mediatization research that decidedly rejects the postmodern relativism often found in nowadays media research. Instead, it demands to consequently admit to the aim of explaining mediatization processes in terms of their underlying causal mechanisms as proposed within the framework of Critical Realism (Danermark, Ekström, & Jakobsen, 2001). Such a turn to the “third way” in media research seems unavoidable in order to accommodate for the challenges brought up by the ever-changing new digital media environments of the 3rd degree (Jensen, 2010) that in effect render a purely interpretive-descriptive approach nearly useless. If our research community wants to communicate insights about mediatization to stakeholders that exceed beyond the diagnosis that global digital media change is actually happening and is complicated and heterogeneous in every field and with every subject, we need to employ and propagate integrative meta-theoretical concepts. These may help us by intersubjectively establishing similarities and differences of empirical phenomena on the societal, collective and individual level. Furthermore, we may employ them to test, compare and discuss potentially causal mechanisms that accommodate for observed long-term change and inertia regarding the media environments in focus. Accordingly, three integrative meta-theoretical concepts of different scope are proposed and partly adopted in the light of a critical realist framework: Media Repertoires (Hasebrink & Popp, 2006), Media Affordances (Gibson, 1986) and Media Dispositifs (Lepa & Geimer, 2011). By help of a mixed method approach (Lepa, 2011), their complementary observational foci may even be combined to get a larger picture of the dynamics of the mediatized worlds under examination. C1 - Copenhagen, Denmark DA - 2013/// PY - 2013 ER -