Intergenerational focus groups – The curing effect of watching and discussing news together

Have you ever thought if different generations receive and understand news the same way? In the SMaRT-EU project, the Estonian team of researchers from the University of Tartu leads the objective to answer this question.

We challenged a well-known influencer Keili Sykijainen to create media literacy videos that would be understandable for both the young and the old. All SMaRT-EU partners use these videos in intergenerational mini focus groups to test how information transfers between generations. We ask grandparents and grandchildren to watch these videos together and discuss what they saw.

This enables us to analyse how information is transferred between generations and how it can be used to fight various forms of information disorder, such as fake news or disinformation. The preliminary results of ten mini focus groups conducted in Estonia enable us to conclude that watching and discussing news together may also have a curing effect on infodemics. By the beginning of autumn 2021, we hope to have the results from all project partners to see how intergenerational information exchange functions in other countries. We hope to bring you the final results in the academic publication by the end of the project.