Frame Analysis

Frame analysis is a broadly applied, relatively flexible label for a variety of approaches to studying social constructions of reality. Erving Goffman, who is credited with developing the phrase in his 1974 book Frame Analysis, understood frames to mean the culturally determined definitions of reality that allow people to make sense of objects and events. Goffman envisioned frame analysis to be an element of ethnographic research that would allow analysts to read identifiable chunks of social behavior or strips, so they could understand the frameworks participants were using to make sense of the behavior. This inquiry into framing and its role in social life has had wide effects across the spectrum of social science research interests.

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 have 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 have 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 frameworks 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,” consensual 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 view the question of intentionality in framing in a substantially different way. Both lines of research see frames as relevant to politics precisely because they can be intentionally deployed to create a change in attitudes. Moreover, many agree with William Gamson's assessment that policy issues can be understood principally as competing symbolic packages, with a particular organizing frame at the heart of each package.

Along with resource mobilization and opportunity structures, framing is now recognized to be one of the three critical pillars of organization activity by American social movement theorists. These theorists moved quickly to recognizing that the intentional deployment of frameworks was an important function played by organizations to mobilize adherents and constituents. Rather than a deception enacted between two people, they recognized the process of frame alignment—the linkage of individual and organizational interpretive frameworks—to be a legitimate means to organizational ends. Typically scholars distinguish four processes that operate within this construct: frame bridging, in which organizations reach out to individuals who already have ideologically congruent interpretive frames; frame amplification, in which organizations must emphasize the significance of a value or belief already held by potential constituents to bring them into alignment; frame extension, in which organizations add goals or programs to their core program to attract potential constituents who might not be attracted to the core elements of the program but would be interested in the new elements; and frame transformation, where potential adherents are converted to an entirely new set of beliefs and values.

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