Kira Thiel

Kira Thiel is Junior Researcher at the Leibniz Institute for Media Research | Hans-Bredow-Institut (HBI) since August 2019. Her work focuses on the experiences of children and adolescents in the digital world as part of the competence area “Growing up with Digital Media” within research program 3 “Knowledge for the Media Society“.

As part of the EU Kids Online project, she researches the opportunities and risks of children’s online use, among other things. Her dissertation project Coping with Stressful Online Experiences in Adolescence builds on this topic and focuses on how adolescents deal with stressful online experiences and which coping strategies they use in this regard.

Children’s and adolescents’ online use and coping were also on her agenda in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic. In the project Kids’ Digital Lives in Covid-19 Times (KiDiCoTi), she investigated the effects of the lockdown on the media use and well-being of 11- to 18-year-olds.

In addition to stressful online experiences and how to cope with them, she is also interested in digital media, mainly social media platforms, in the opinion-forming process of young people and related phenomena such as social media influencers and fake news.

Kira Thiel studied communication science (minor in psychology) at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich and children’s and youth media studies at the University of Erfurt. During her studies, she worked at the JFF – Institute for Media Research and Media Education and the children’s television station KiKA of ARD and ZDF.