| Chapter 1: | Introduction |
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selection of the people working within EU institutions, responsible for the production of the EUROPA Web site; the majority of whom worked within the DG COMM of the European Commission. Therefore, communicators does not refer to all the institutions or every single person involved with the EUROPA Web site.
Regarding any claims on generalisable, representative findings—there were none. This study was, first and foremost, based on qualitative enquiry, and aimed to get an in-depth understanding of the various factors influencing the interactions. While quantitative data were included in a secondary analysis of Standard EB data, these were only used as a means to set the data gathered empirically in relation to the larger national contexts, and to compare individual attitudes of the participants to the public opinion data for each country. Hence, the focus was on qualitative data and on individual user accounts, rather than on trying to ask representative numbers of people throughout the EU about their attitudes towards the institutions, which, in the end, was accomplished by the EB studies. So the contribution of this study lay in its depth rather than its width, and this should be kept in mind, especially in regard to data analysis and interpretation. What follows is a general summary of the structure of this text, so as to gain an overview of what is to come.
1.5. Structure of This Text
As the online interaction between users, communicators, and a Web site involves a multitude of elements, findings from various fields of research need to be considered. These include but are certainly not limited to: information and communication science, sociology, (cognitive) psychology, usability and ergonomics, consumer behaviour and marketing, citizen participation and political communication, social informatics, as well as human-computer-interaction (HCI). While these are the broader fields of research requiring a closer look, they will not be dealt with separately but selectively, wherever their input contributed most to the study at hand. As many findings and theoretical underpinnings in this