| Chapter 1: | Introduction |
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lack of interest in the EU, it could be expected that the picture would be similarly grim for school students. Even if (young) people did not display a great interest in the EU, they would most likely still have an opinion, whether that was an informed opinion or not.
Another reason for choosing to study 16-year-olds, rather than younger users, was that most national media use statistics that include this age group in their samples, but do not usually extend their studies to younger age groups. Selecting the 16-year-old age group, therefore, allowed for the integration of additional information, which in turn made it possible to compare individual cases to national quantitative figures.
1.4. Delimitations
Apart from introducing the main aim and purpose on these first pages and circling in on the object of study, it should also be stated clearly what this study did not examine so as to avoid confusion, and to save time for those readers who ‘perceived’ the title of this study to mean something different.
To summarise the issues not covered in this study: First, its focus was on information seeking online, and thus on communication via the Internet, but not on the use of other media. These only played a role in as far as they determined the user context in relation to the role of the Internet for each individual participant or the importance of the Internet in a national context. Regarding the modes of Internet use, there was a clear focus on information seeking and the respective information provision on a specific Web site. This excluded other modes of Internet use such as browsing, online shopping, chatting, social networking, or any other form that did not entail goal-directed searching for information. Furthermore, this study did not attempt to create an overview of user perceptions throughout the EU. Rather, it was concerned with three specific groups of users—in Germany, Denmark, and Great Britain—who were examined individually and in comparison to each other. All of these users were young people (16-year-old school students). When referring to communicators, it was, again, a specific group of communicators: a