Frame analysis (also called framing analysis) is a multi-disciplinary social science research method used to analyze how people understand situations and activities. Frame analysis looks at images, stereotypes, metaphors, actors, messages, and more. It examines how important these factors are and how and why they are chosen. [1] The concept is generally attributed to the work of Erving Goffman and his 1974 book Frame analysis: An essay on the organization of experience and has been developed in social movement theory, policy studies and elsewhere. [2]
Framing theory and frame analysis is a broad theoretical approach that has been used in communication studies, news (Johnson-Cartee, 1995), politics, and social movements among other applications. "Framing is the process by which a communication source, such as a news organization, defines and constructs a political issue or public controversy" (Nelson, Oxley, & Clawson, 1997, p. 221). [3] It is related to the concept of agenda-setting. Framing influences how people interpret or process information. [4] This can set an agenda. However, frame analysis goes beyond agenda-setting by examining the issues rather than the topics. [4]
Frame analysis is usually done in regard to news media. However, framing is inevitable, as everyone does it. [4] It can speed up the process of interpretation as well as writing and presenting the news. [5] People just may not realize they are using frames. [4] When people are aware that they are using framing, there are several techniques that can be used. These may include: metaphor, stories, tradition, slogan, jargon, catchphrase, artifact, contrast or spin. [1]
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Frame analysis had been proposed as a type of rhetorical analysis for political actors in the 1980s. Political communication researcher Jim A. Kuypers first published his work advancing framing analysis as a rhetorical perspective in 1997. His approach begins inductively by looking for themes that persist across time in a text (for Kuypers, primarily news narratives on an issue or event), and then determining how those themes are framed. Kuypers' work begins with the assumption that frames are powerful rhetorical entities that "induce us to filter our perceptions of the world in particular ways, essentially making some aspects of our multi-dimensional reality more noticeable than other aspects. They operate by making some information more salient than other information. ..." [6] In "Framing Analysis From a Rhetorical Perspective" Kuypers details the differences between framing analysis as rhetorical criticism and as a social scientific endeavor, in particular arguing that framing criticism offers insights unavailable to social scientists. [7]
In his 2009 work, Rhetorical Criticism: Perspectives in Action [8] Kuypers offers a detailed template for doing framing analysis from a rhetorical perspective. According to Kuypers, "Framing is a process whereby communicators, consciously or unconsciously, act to construct a point of view that encourages the facts of a given situation to be interpreted by others in a particular manner. Frames operate in four key ways: they define problems, diagnose causes, make moral judgments, and suggest remedies. Frames are often found within a narrative account of an issue or event, and are generally the central organizing idea." [9] Kuypers' work is based on the premise that framing is a rhetorical process and as such it is best examined from a rhetorical point of view.
In his book, Goffman said that people use their primary framework to examine their world. [4] There are also distinctions within primary frameworks. There are natural and social frameworks. [4] Natural frameworks don't apply social forces to situations. [4] They just exist naturally. However, social frameworks do apply social forces to situations. [4] The two are connected because social frameworks stem from natural frameworks. [4]
Framing has been utilized to explain the process of social movements (Snow & Benford, 1988). [10] Movements are carriers of beliefs and ideologies. In addition, they are part of the process of constructing meaning for participants and opposers (Snow & Benford, 1988). Mass movements are said to be successful when the frames projected align with the frames of participants to produce resonance between the two parties. This is a process known as frame alignment.
Snow and Benford (1988) say that frame alignment is an important element in social mobilization or movement. They argue that when individual frames become linked in congruency and complementariness, that "frame alignment" occurs (p. 198; Snow et al. 1986, p. 464 [11] ), producing "frame resonance", which is key to the process of a group transitioning from one frame to another (although not all framing efforts are successful). The conditions that affect or constrain framing efforts are:
Snow and Benford (1986) propose that once proper frames are constructed as described above, large-scale changes in society such as those necessary for social movement can be achieved through frame alignment.
There are four types, which include frame bridging, frame amplification, frame extension and frame transformation.
Frame analysis for political thought has been dominated by two popular cognitive scientists: George Lakoff, nurturant parent governance; and Frank Luntz, strict father governance. [12]
The deductive frame analysis pre-defines frames and then looks for them in the news to see which stories fit into the definitions. [13] The inductive frame analysis requires that a story is analyzed first. [13] The researcher looks for possible frames that have been loosely defined. [13]
Other examples of frames may include: health severity, thematic and episodic, medical, uncertainty, alarmist. [5] What frames are used depends on the event at hand.
Since frame analyses are conducted manually, they require significant effort and time. Recently, some researchers have proposed to automate parts of frame analysis. For example, one approach aims to find instances of biased news coverage in news articles. [14] The automated approach imitates frame analysis by using natural language processing and media bias models.
Erving Goffman was a Canadian-born American sociologist, social psychologist, and writer, considered by some "the most influential American sociologist of the twentieth century".
Communication theory is a proposed description of communication phenomena, the relationships among them, a storyline describing these relationships, and an argument for these three elements. Communication theory provides a way of talking about and analyzing key events, processes, and commitments that together form communication. Theory can be seen as a way to map the world and make it navigable; communication theory gives us tools to answer empirical, conceptual, or practical communication questions.
Symbolic interactionism is a sociological theory that develops from practical considerations and alludes to humans' particular use of shared language to create common symbols and meanings, for use in both intra- and interpersonal communication. According to Macionis, symbolic interactionism is "a framework for building theory that sees society as the product of everyday interactions of individuals". In other words, it is a frame of reference to better understand how individuals interact with one another to create symbolic worlds, and in return, how these worlds shape individual behaviors. It is a framework that helps understand how society is preserved and created through repeated interactions between individuals. The interpretation process that occurs between interactions helps create and recreate meaning. It is the shared understanding and interpretations of meaning that affect the interaction between individuals. Individuals act on the premise of a shared understanding of meaning within their social context. Thus, interaction and behavior is framed through the shared meaning that objects and concepts have attached to them. From this view, people live in both natural and symbolic environments.
The theory of structuration is a social theory of the creation and reproduction of social systems that is based on the analysis of both structure and agents, without giving primacy to either. Furthermore, in structuration theory, neither micro- nor macro-focused analysis alone is sufficient. The theory was proposed by sociologist Anthony Giddens, most significantly in The Constitution of Society, which examines phenomenology, hermeneutics, and social practices at the inseparable intersection of structures and agents. Its proponents have adopted and expanded this balanced position. Though the theory has received much criticism, it remains a pillar of contemporary sociological theory.
In micro-sociology, interactionism is a theoretical perspective that sees social behavior as an interactive product of the individual and the situation. In other words, it derives social processes from social interaction, whereby subjectively held meanings are integral to explaining or understanding social behavior.
Rhetorical criticism analyzes the symbolic artifacts of discourse—the words, phrases, images, gestures, performances, texts, films, etc. that people use to communicate. Rhetorical analysis shows how the artifacts work, how well they work, and how the artifacts, as discourse, inform and instruct, entertain and arouse, and convince and persuade the audience; as such, discourse includes the possibility of morally improving the reader, the viewer, and the listener. Rhetorical criticism studies and analyzes the purpose of the words, sights, and sounds that are the symbolic artifacts used for communications among people.
Dramaturgy is a sociological perspective that analyzes micro-sociological accounts of everyday social interactions through the analogy of performativity and theatrical dramaturgy, dividing such interactions between "actors", "audience" members, and various "front" and "back" stages.
Audience theory offers explanations of how people encounter media, how they use it, and how it affects them. Although the concept of an audience predates media, most audience theory is concerned with people’s relationship to various forms of media. There is no single theory of audience, but a range of explanatory frameworks. These can be rooted in the social sciences, rhetoric, literary theory, cultural studies, communication studies and network science depending on the phenomena they seek to explain. Audience theories can also be pitched at different levels of analysis ranging from individuals to large masses or networks of people.
Social movement theory is an interdisciplinary study within the social sciences that generally seeks to explain why social mobilization occurs, the forms under which it manifests, as well as potential social, cultural, political, and economic consequences, such as the creation and functioning of social movements.
Dramatism, a communication studies theory, was developed by Kenneth Burke as a tool for analyzing human relationships through the use of language. Burke viewed dramatism from the lens of logology, which studies how people's ways of speaking shape their attitudes towards the world. According to this theory, the world is a stage where all the people present are actors and their actions parallel a drama. Burke then correlates dramatism with motivation, saying that people are "motivated" to behave in response to certain situations, similar to how actors in a play are motivated to behave or function. Burke discusses two important ideas – that life is drama, and the ultimate motive of rhetoric is the purging of guilt. Burke recognized guilt as the base of human emotions and motivations for action. As cited in "A Note on Burke on "Motive"", the author recognized the importance of "motive" in Burke's work. In "Kenneth Burke's concept of motives in rhetorical theory", the authors mentioned that Burke believes that guilt, "combined with other constructs, describes the totality of the compelling force within an event which explains why the event took place."
Jim A. Kuypers is an American scholar and consultant specializing in communication studies. A professor at Virginia Tech, he has written on the news media, rhetorical criticism and presidential rhetoric, and is particularly known for his work in political communication which explores the qualitative aspects of framing analysis and its relationship to presidential communication and news media bias.
In the social sciences, framing comprises a set of concepts and theoretical perspectives on how individuals, groups, and societies organize, perceive, and communicate about reality. Framing can manifest in thought or interpersonal communication. Frames in thought consist of the mental representations, interpretations, and simplifications of reality. Frames in communication consist of the communication of frames between different actors. Framing is a key component of sociology, the study of social interaction among humans. Framing is an integral part of conveying and processing data daily. Successful framing techniques can be used to reduce the ambiguity of intangible topics by contextualizing the information in such a way that recipients can connect to what they already know.
Symbolic convergence theory (SCT) is a communication theory developed by Ernest Bormann proposing that the holding of fantasies in common transforms collections of individuals into cohesive groups. SCT offers an explanation for the appearance of a group's cohesiveness, consisting of shared emotions, motives, and meanings. Through SCT, individuals can build a community or a group consciousness which grows stronger if they share a cluster of fantasy themes. Symbolic convergence theory provides a description of the dynamic tendencies within systems of social interaction that cause communicative practices and forms to evolve. This theory allows theorists and practitioners to anticipate or predict what will happen and explain what did happen. One thing SCT does not do is allow for control of human communication. It attempts to explain how communication can create and sustain group consciousness through the sharing of narratives or fantasies.
Also known as reception analysis, audience reception theory has come to be widely used as a way of characterizing the wave of audience research which occurred within communications and cultural studies during the 1980s and 1990s. On the whole, this work has adopted a "culturalist" perspective, has tended to use qualitative methods of research and has tended to be concerned, one way or another, with exploring the active choices, uses and interpretations made of media materials, by their consumers. Can also be known as reception theory, in which producers encode with a desired response, then the audience decode.
Digital Live Art is the intersection of Live Art, Computing and Human Computer Interaction (HCI). It is used to describe live performance which is computer mediated - an orchestrated, temporal witnessed event occurring for any length of time and in any place using technological means. Digital Live Art borrows the methods, tools and theories from HCI to help inform and analyze the design and evaluation of Digital Live Art experiences.
Interactional sociolinguistics is a subdiscipline of linguistics that uses discourse analysis to study how language users create meaning via social interaction. It is one of the ways in which linguists look at the intersections of human language and human society; other subfields that take this perspective are language planning, minority language studies, quantitative sociolinguistics, and sociohistorical linguistics, among others. Interactional sociolinguistics is a theoretical and methodological framework within the discipline of linguistic anthropology, which combines the methodology of linguistics with the cultural consideration of anthropology in order to understand how the use of language informs social and cultural interaction. Interactional sociolinguistics was founded by linguistic anthropologist John J. Gumperz. Topics that might benefit from an Interactional sociolinguistic analysis include: cross-cultural miscommunication, politeness, and framing.
A rhetorical situation is an event that consists of an issue, an audience, and a set of constraints. A rhetorical situation arises from a given context or exigence. An article by Lloyd Bitzer introduced the model of the rhetorical situation in 1968, which was later challenged and modified by Richard E. Vatz (1973) and Scott Consigny (1974). More recent scholarship has further redefined the model to include more expansive views of rhetorical operations and ecologies.
David A. Snow is a Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Irvine.
Text and conversation is a theory in the field of organizational communication illustrating how communication makes up an organization. In the theory's simplest explanation, an organization is created and defined by communication. Communication "is" the organization and the organization exists because communication takes place. The theory is built on the notion, an organization is not seen as a physical unit holding communication. Text and conversation theory puts communication processes at the heart of organizational communication and postulates, an organization doesn't contain communication as a "causal influence", but is formed by the communication within. This theory is not intended for direct application, but rather to explain how communication exists. The theory provides a framework for better understanding organizational communication.
Political bias is a bias or perceived bias involving the slanting or altering of information to make a political position or political candidate seem more attractive. With a distinct association with media bias, it commonly refers to how a reporter, news organisation, or TV show covers a political candidate or a policy issue.