frame analysis

frame analysis, a broadly applied, relatively flexible label for a variety of approaches to studying social constructions of reality.

The sociologist Erving Goffman, who is credited with coining the term in his 1974 book Frame Analysis, understood the idea of the frame to mean the culturally determined definitions of reality that allow people to make sense of objects and events. For example, a car advertisement might seek to frame driving as an essentially pleasurable activity by associating it with recognizable symbols of play and leisure (in the target culture) such as a beach. Goffman envisioned frame analysis to be an element of ethnographic research that would allow analysts to read identifiable chunks of social behaviour, or “strips,” in order to understand the frames that participants use to make sense of the behaviour (whether they apprehend their reality, for instance, through a religious or a secular frame). The study of framing and its role in social life has had wide effects across a broad spectrum of the social sciences.

Social psychology and economics found common ground in Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky’s Nobel Prize-winning research into how the framing of problems influences decision making. Social movement researchers developed more-specific uses for frame analysis, turning the general ethnographic method into a more-specified tool for understanding the particular dynamics of activist movements. Media scholars emphasized the political role played by frames in mass communication, examining the use of frames to guide audiences to preferred conclusions by simultaneously highlighting particular aspects of reality and hiding others.

Social movement research and political communication have been the two main subfields of political science to consider the role of frames. However, work in both areas has moved substantially away from Goffman’s formulation by reconsidering the role of intentionality in framing. Goffman saw frames as being either “primary frameworks”—the product of larger culture and shared by all within a culture—or as intentionally fabricated by individuals—a “transformation” of the primary frameworks. Individuals who intentionally deploy frames transform a culturally constructed social reality and do so either in play or to deceive. Goffman’s reading of intentional framing thus cast it as a move away from a more “authentic” reality rather than as an element that revealed the struggles for power constituting or maintaining that reality. Meanwhile, both social movement and political communication scholars viewed the question of intentionality in framing in a substantially different way. Both lines of research saw frames as relevant to politics precisely because they can be intentionally deployed to create a change in attitudes.

Social movement theorists also recognized framing as a pillar of organizational activity. These theorists moved quickly to recognize that the intentional deployment of frames is an important function played by organizations to mobilize adherents and constituents. They recognized the process of frame alignment—the linkage of individual and organizational interpretive frames—to be not a deception enacted between two people but rather a legitimate means to organizational ends.

Theorists of political communication studied frames as one way that media (or the elites who manipulate them) can influence audiences’ political attitudes. Although audiences can potentially interpret texts in a number of different ways, people are most likely, in the absence of having additional information, to interpret problems, causes, and solutions for issues in terms of the way that those issues have been framed.