Beyond the Black Box: A Multimodal Approach to Understanding In-App Communication

  • Mobile devices are increasingly central as sources of up-to-date information, making the precise recording of information behavior on these devices more relevant for research. Established methods of automated data collection are reaching their limits when capturing in-app communication, such as political content within social media applications. Based on two case studies, we present two approaches that enable the identification of exposure to relevant content and, to some extent, the collection of in-app content. The first case study focuses on identifying relevant exposure across different apps on a mobile device using app tracking and screen recordings. The second case study focuses on linking exposure to seen content and deriving respective content features to obtain an enriched dataset. We discuss the advantages and limitations of both approaches and present conceptual frameworks for processing and analyzing such data.

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Metadaten
Author:Patrick Zerrer, Paul Pressmann, Cornelius Puschmann, Philipp Krieter
Qualitätssicherung:peer reviewed
open access:Diamant - ohne Publikationskosten mit Lizenzhinweis
Fachbereich/Einrichtung:Hochschule Düsseldorf / Fachbereich - Medien
Document Type:Article
Year of Completion:2026
Language of Publication:English
Publisher:Nomos Verlag
Parent Title (English):Medien & Kommunikationswissenschaft
Volume:74
Issue:1
Page Number:21
First Page:31
Last Page:51
DOI:https://doi.org/10.5771/1615-634X-2026-1-31
ISSN:1615-634X
Tag:android logs; in-app tracking; mobile sensing; mobile tracking; screen recording
Licence (German):Creative Commons - CC BY - Namensnennung 4.0 International
Release Date:2026/02/20
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