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Frame Analysis

Frame analysis is the study of the frames, or fundamental schemes of interpretation, by which people in social situations make coherent sense of what is occurring in those situations. Frame analysis assumes that social events and personal experiences may be understood by social actors in a variety of ways but that such understandings have their own structure and coherence, which can be systematically described. The concept was initially coined and developed by Erving Goffman (1974) but since the mid-1980s has predominantly been used in the study of social movements, and to a lesser extent in narrative and discourse analysis as well as communication studies.

Goffman's Frame Analysis

In Goffman's original formulation, frame analysis was a method for studying “the organization of experience,” echoing concerns raised by William James and early phenomenological philosophers such as Edmund Husserl and Alfred Schutz. For Schutz, individuals could experience the “multiple realities” of everyday life, dreams, hallucinations, revery, and such; Goffman borrowed and expanded this notion to include the different realities of jokes, rehearsals, parodies, plays, and a host of other interpretations of situations that are less “primary frameworks” than simple, everyday life. In this, Goffman also continued sociological interest in the “definition of the situation,” a concept that recognized the problematicity of the coherence and meaning of a social scene, and his own social dramaturgy, which actively explored the metaphor of “life as theater.” Goffman also drew on Gregory Bateson's ideas about the play as an unserious version of a real event, and the ethnomethodology of Harold Garfinkel.

Goffman's primary concern was the ontological status of the social scene, that is, the “realness” of what is happening. For instance, a play about Winston Churchill is in some sense less “real” than the life depicted therein; and a rehearsal for the performance is less “real” than the opening performance itself; and if the actors begin joking during the rehearsal, what they do is clearly still another step removed, even if the jokes continue to be about Churchill himself. Such transformations of similar actions by a reconsideration of their meaning Goffman called “keying,” using a musical metaphor. The “frame,” in this case, is the internal logic of the situation that supports a given ontological level (as reality, performance, rehearsal, or joke). Similarly, Goffman examined the various external boundaries of a scene, for instance, between actors and audience: A scene in a play may intentionally provoke laughter among the audience, and although the actors pause to allow for the laughter, their characters must not recognize the people laughing as being there. Goffman used such distinctions as clues to the structure of social life generally. For Goffman, a social event, a “strip” of activity that is somewhat arbitrarily cut out of the flow of human life, thus has both an internal syntax and an external boundary whose recognition, following implicit rules, are part of what creates the event itself. Goffman detailed many of the rules that govern a wide range of such levels of reality.

Social Movement Theory

In the late 1970s and increasingly throughout the 1980s, frame analysis, based loosely on Goffman's original concept, became a popular research tool among social movement scholars, who realized that political power often lies in a movement's ability to impose situational definitions or interpretations, or “frames,” onto otherwise ill-defined events and experiences. As in Goffman, the “frame” metaphor continued to be ambiguous, referring both to the internal logic of arguments, as in the structural frame of a house, and to the boundary by which issues or events are separated out for attention or defined as a scene, as in the frame of a painting. The use of frame analysis was in part a reaction against what movement scholars regarded as the mechanistic or excessively causal explanations of either rational choice theory or resource mobilization theory in the study of social movements. In contrast, frame analysis emphasized agency, the free choice of both activists and audiences (especially of potential participants in a movement), the importance of meaning and interpretation in human events, and the cultural backgrounds out of which varying interpretations of events could arise or within which interpretations could be accepted. Frame analysts studied, for instance, how activists devised arguments that would appeal to broad publics; how media organizations interpreted public events in politically consequential ways; and how various audiences responded to different appeals and interpretations. In America, for example, movements often frame their arguments as a fight against “injustice” and cast arguments drawing on widely held values, such as individual rights, equality of opportunity, or freedom from government intervention. Scholars examined how the “alignment” of frames with the fundamental values of audiences affected acceptability and how frames could be extended or reshaped. The underlying message of frame analysis in social movements theory is that a movement's audiences—members, potential members, opponents, and the public at large—are affected by the interpretation they place on events, and the interpretations (a) can be shaped deliberately by movement activists and (b) frequently rest on emotional and symbolic responses to messages as much as on logical or empirical grounds.

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