New research project acquired

19.07.2019

The Austrian Science Fund (FWF) will fund Florian Arendt's research on suicide reporting of Austrian newspapers in the 19th century.

The project "Reporting on Suicide in the Nineteenth Century: Large-Scale Content Analysis and an Investigation of Long-Term Imitative Werther Effects" will run for four years and start January 1, 2020.

About: Suicide rates dramatically increased in many countries during the nineteenth century, also in the geographic region of the present state of Austria. Previous research has repeatedly assumed that the press may have contributed to the establishment of suicide as a mass phenomenon back then. This project has two aims: First, a large-scale content analysis of suicide reporting of Austrian newspapers in the nineteenth century will be conducted. This will be the first study of its kind globally, aiming to enrich our historical knowledge of suicide reporting. Second, there will be a thorough investigation of the question whether the press had an influence on the suicide rate in Austria (imitative Werther effects).