Bereikstudies

Bereikstudies is an interdisciplinary field examining reach and dissemination of information, campaigns, products, or messages across social networks and media ecosystems, and how this reach translates into awareness or behavior. The field analyzes how messages propagate, who they reach, through which platforms, and what effects the reach has on attitudes and actions.

The term appears mainly in Dutch-language discourse and is used variably; there is no single universal definition. Researchers may draw from marketing analytics, communications, epidemiology, or network science to study reach and its consequences.

Core questions in bereikstudies include what fraction of a target population is reached, through which channels and touchpoints reach occurs, how quickly reach accumulates, and what constitutes the quality of reach in terms of demographic, geographic, and engagement factors.

Methods commonly used involve quantitative analytics, multichannel attribution, diffusion modeling, network analysis, and geospatial analysis. Data sources range from web analytics and social platform metrics to broadcast audience ratings and surveys, and researchers may also employ experiments or quasi-experiments to test causal effects of reach.

Applications span marketing, public health campaigns, political communication, sustainability outreach, and corporate communications. Bereikstudies can inform media planning, campaign design, and policy evaluation by focusing on reach, saturation, and secondary effects rather than only on engagement or sales.

Challenges include measurement bias, privacy and data governance, cross-channel attribution, and comparing reach across diverse contexts. As a field, bereikstudies sits at the intersection of data science and social science, with ongoing definitional and methodological debates.

See also: diffusion of innovations, network science, marketing analytics, media studies.