Framing Youth Development for Public Support: New Directions for Youth Development

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NEW DIRECTIONS FOR YOUTH DEVELOPMENT

Theory Practice Research

winter 2009

Framing Youth Development for Public Support

issue Lynn Davey editor

Gil G. Noam Editor-in-Chief

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FRAMING YOUTH DEVELOPMENT FOR PUBLIC SUPPORT Lynn Davey (ed.) New Directions for Youth Development, No. 124, Winter 2009 Gil G. Noam, Editor-in-Chief This is a peer-reviewed journal. Copyright © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc., A Wiley Company. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means, except as permitted under sections 107 and 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the publisher or authorization through the Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923; (978) 750-8400; fax (978) 6468600. The copyright notice appearing at the bottom of the first page of an article in this journal indicates the copyright holder’s consent that copies may be made for personal or internal use, or for personal or internal use of specific clients, on the condition that the copier pay for copying beyond that permitted by law. This consent does not extend to other kinds of copying, such as copying for general distribution, for advertising or promotional purposes, for creating collective works, or for resale. Such permission requests and other permission inquiries should be addressed to the Permissions Department, c/o John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030; (201) 748-6011, fax (201) 7486008, www.wiley.com/go/permissions. Microfilm copies of issues and articles are available in 16mm and 35mm, as well as microfiche in 105mm, through University Microfilms Inc., 300 North Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48106-1346. New Directions for Youth Development (ISSN 1533-8916, electronic ISSN 1537-5781) is part of The Jossey-Bass Psychology Series and is published quarterly by Wiley Subscription Services, Inc., A Wiley Company, at Jossey-Bass, 989 Market Street, San Francisco, California 94103-1741. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to New Directions for Youth Development, Jossey-Bass, 989 Market Street, San Francisco, California 94103-1741. SUBSCRIPTIONS for individuals cost $85.00 for U.S./Canada/Mexico; $109.00 international. For institutions, agencies, and libraries, $249.00 U.S.; $289.00 Canada/Mexico; $323.00 international. Prices subject to change. Refer to the order form that appears at the back of most volumes of this journal. EDITORIAL CORRESPONDENCE should be sent to the Editor-in-Chief, Dr. Gil G. Noam, McLean Hospital, Harvard Medical School, 115 Mill Street, Belmont, MA 02478. Cover photograph by Corbis www.josseybass.com

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Gil G. Noam, Editor-in-Chief Harvard University and McLean Hospital Editorial Board K. Anthony Appiah Princeton University Princeton, N.J. Peter Benson Search Institute Minneapolis, Minn.

Richard Lerner Tufts University Medford, Mass. Milbrey W. McLaughlin Stanford University Stanford, Calif.

Dale A. Blyth University of Minnesota Minneapolis, Minn.

Judy Nee National AfterSchool Association West Palm Beach, Fla.

Dante Cicchetti University of Minnesota Minneapolis, Minn.

Pedro Noguera New York University New York, N.Y.

William Damon Stanford University Palo Alto, Calif. Goéry Delacoˆte At-Bristol Science Museum Bristol, England

Fritz Oser University of Fribourg Fribourg, Switzerland Karen Pittman The Forum for Youth Investment Washington, D.C.

Felton Earls Harvard Medical School Boston, Mass.

Jane Quinn The Children’s Aid Society New York, N.Y.

Jacquelynne S. Eccles University of Michigan Ann Arbor, Mich.

Jean Rhodes University of Massachusetts, Boston Boston, Mass.

Wolfgang Edelstein Max Planck Institute for Human Development Berlin, Germany Kurt Fischer Harvard Graduate School of Education Cambridge, Mass. Carol Gilligan New York University Law School New York, N.Y. Robert Granger W. T. Grant Foundation New York, N.Y. Reed Larson University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Urbana-Champaign, Ill.

Rainer Silbereisen University of Jena Jena, Germany Elizabeth Stage University of California at Berkeley Berkeley, Calif. Hans Steiner Stanford Medical School Stanford, Calif. Carola Suárez-Orozco New York University New York, N.Y. Marcelo Suárez-Orozco New York University New York, N.Y.

Erin Cooney, Editorial Manager Program in Education, Afterschool and Resiliency (PEAR)

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Contents Issue Editor’s Notes Lynn Davey

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Executive Summary

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Part One: Strategic Frame Analysis: Theoretical and Empirical Assumptions 1. The trouble with issues: The case for intentional framing Susan Nall Bales

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This theoretical framework suggests that intentional framing of youth issues can fundamentally shift Americans’ understanding of how systems and policies can improve the lives of youth.

2. Strategic Frame Analysis: Providing the “evidence” for evidence-based communications 29 Tiffany Manuel, Lynn Davey How can a multimethod, empirical approach to communications serve to improve public understanding and support for social problems?

Part Two: Research in Action 3. The family bubble, achievement gap, and development as competition: Media frames on youth 39 Moira O’Neil Cognitive media content analysis identifies how the news media frame youth issues, mapping the public conversation writ large but also identifying the implicit understandings that mainstream media convey about youth.

4. Mapping cultural models and translating expert explanations of child development with simplifying models 51 Nathaniel Kendall-Taylor Exploring the cultural models—or patterns of understanding—that people employ when reasoning about child and youth development is an essential step in identifying the framing strategies that will close the gap between expert and lay understandings.

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5. From focus groups to peer discourse sessions: The evolution of a method to capture language, meaning, and negotiation 61 Tiffany Manuel, Nathaniel Kendall-Taylor Peer discourse sessions are a specific application of focus group methodology used to explore how the public negotiates discourse about social problems.

6. Who says your frames are better than mine? Making the case for strategic framing by using the power of experimental research 71 Tiffany Manuel Experimental manipulation of frame effects can distinguish effective from ineffective frame strategies and offer quantitative evidence of which frame elements do and do not improve public understanding of and policy support for social problems.

Part Three: Building the Field 7. From research to practice: Communications for social change 83 Lynn Davey Research from the social-cognitive sciences and social movement literature provides the foundations of this approach to teaching evidence-based communications to the field of policy advocates and practitioners.

8. Framing in the field: A case study Diane Benjamin

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Examples are presented of successful framing practice by child and youth advocates who are transforming their communications strategies and improving their advocacy efforts.

9. Campaigning for children’s oral health: A case study Kate Vaughan

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Coordinated media campaigns have the potential to increase public awareness and understanding of social problems. This case study of a campaign for children’s oral health highlights the essential role of research-based message development in successful issue campaigning.

10. Strategic Framing Study Circles: Toward a gold standard of framing pedagogy 103 Jane Feinberg Framing study circles with coalitions of issue advocates constitutes a best practice in teaching advocates to apply the science of framing to their communications efforts.

11. Embracing the long view: A funder’s perspective on Strategic Frame Analysis 111 Jane Feinberg, Curt McPhail One foundation shares its efforts to make strategic communications a core organizational competency.

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Part Four: New Frontiers 12. Lessons from the story of early child development: Domain decisions and framing youth development 119 Susan Nall Bales, Franklin D. Gilliam Jr. Evidence suggests that framing both early childhood and youth issues in terms of development is preferable to any of the alternatives offered to date (such as workforce, crime, education, or health).

Index

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Issue Editor’s Notes in the political science literature that how issues are framed in public discourse, in the news media, influences which patterns of thinking, or mental models, are most readily available to people when they are evaluating social issues. The more the media emphasize certain aspects of an issue and ignore others, the more accessible the corresponding models become and the easier it is for those highly emphasized dimensions of a problem to crowd out other considerations. For example, the dominant news frame for child and youth issues is parental responsibility. When the public is confronted repeatedly with such framing, considerations of the family as solely responsible for children’s development become more easily triggered and relied on to evaluate policy solutions. So evaluations and judgments about a range of issues that affect children—from pre-K, to child nutrition, to after-school programs—are often thought to be assailable by parental action alone. When, however, the public is presented with information about how children develop—that experiences literally build the architecture of the maturing brain and that this is accomplished through a “serve-and-return” process of interaction with caring adults—the public can more easily consider the role of systems and structures in policy solutions, from quality standards in early care settings to paid sick leave for parents. In short, the mental models triggered by the frames in the public discourse determine how the problem is conceptualized by attentive publics and therefore shape the solutions that can be seen. Intentional framing, then, seeks to activate or invigorate considerations that may not have had sufficient play in the public debate but

IT IS WELL ESTABLISHED

NEW DIRECTIONS FOR YOUTH DEVELOPMENT, NO. 124, WINTER 2009 © WILEY PERIODICALS, INC. Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com) • DOI: 10.1002/yd.319

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FRAMING YOUTH DEVELOPMENT FOR PUBLIC SUPPORT

offer to the public a fuller and nuanced understanding of the causes of and solutions to social problems. Since 1999, the nonprofit FrameWorks Institute has investigated how Americans think about social issues, from children and youth to education and race, and how scientists, policy experts, and advocates can do a better job of engaging the public in solutions. FrameWorks Institute’s multimethod, empirical approach integrates essential constructs from the cognitive and social sciences to investigate the worldviews and patterns of thinking that ordinary people enlist when considering social problems. The goal of this approach is to deliver communications strategies that are grounded in research and have been shown, through extensive qualitative and quantitative testing, to improve support for policy solutions. This volume focuses on the theory, research, and practice of FrameWorks’ decade of work in evidence-based communications strategies for child and youth issues and ends with a call to youth experts and advocates to envision a more strategic approach to communications on behalf of young people. The articles in Part One articulate theoretical and empirical assumptions of the Strategic Frame Analysis approach to communications. In the first article, Susan Nall Bales explains where this approach is situated: within the social and cognitive science scholarship that has addressed the impact of media frames on how people reason about social problems. Bales argues that intentional framing of youth issues can shift the public’s understanding of policies that can improve the lives of youth. In the second article, Tiffany Manuel and Lynn Davey explain why an iterative, multimethod empirical process is necessary to determine the communication strategies that will elevate the public dimensions of social problems. Part Two is given to explications of the core methods of this empirical approach. Because this is an iterative approach, with each method instructive to subsequent inquiry, the chapters are presented here in the order in which they are sequenced during the course of a research inquiry. In the third article, Moira O’Neil explains that identifying how the media frame issues is an important step in measuring public understanding. Using findings from a new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd

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ISSUE EDITOR’S NOTES

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recent media content analysis of racial disparities as they pertain to youth, she discusses which frames are likely to inhibit or advance considerations of policy solutions. In the fourth article, Nathaniel Kendall-Taylor explains how semistructured cognitive interviews serve to explore and map the cultural models, or generalized structures of meaning, with which people reason about social issues. An essential part of this stage of the research draws on methods from cognitive anthropology and linguistics to identify the gaps between lay and expert understandings of an issue and to generate and test metaphorical simplifying models that will effectively bridge the expert-lay gap. In the fifth article, Manuel and Kendall-Taylor discuss how peer discourse sessions are used to see these cultural models in action in the public square, or how engaged citizens negotiate a social discourse on an issue. In the final article in Part Two, Manuel describes the quantitative testing of the findings that have emerged in the prior qualitative stages of research. Experimental surveys are used to distinguish which issue frames improve public understanding of an issue and generate support for policy solutions. The chapters in Part Three are dedicated to exploring how experts and advocates are applying these evidence-based communications strategies to their work on behalf of children and youth. As Davey explains in the seventh article, simple dissemination of research findings has not proved sufficient in building a field with the capacity for sustained and strategic communications practice. Instead, intentional and curriculum-based instruction is required, as is an acknowledgment among advocates, experts, and funders that communications serves a purpose broader than creative expression. It must, in fact, be strategic and evidence based. Two case studies follow this chapter and provide illustrations of the challenges and opportunities advocates experience in adapting strategic framing to their issue advocacy. In the eighth article, Diane Benjamin reviews FrameWorks’ decade of technical assistance with the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s national network of state Kids Count projects and provides a case study of child and youth advocates who have successfully incorporated framing principles and recommendations into their work. In the ninth article, Kate new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd

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Vaughan shows what happens when research and practice culminate in a research-driven media campaign. The case study of Watch Your Mouth, a coordinated media campaign on children’s oral health, shows how public understanding can shift when issue campaigns are anchored in evidence-based framing strategies. In the tenth article, Jane Feinberg explains that the FrameWorks Institute has been working toward a gold standard of field building in the form of Strategic Framing Study Circles. These intensive immersion experiences enable advocates to learn the science and practice of the art of framing over an extended period of time, thereby increasing the chances of sustained mastery. The eleventh article offers the story of one foundation’s commitment to strategic communications. This interview between FrameWorks’ Jane Feinberg and Curt McPhail of the Mary Black Foundation, which funded a study circle on early childhood issues in South Carolina, highlights the challenges in incorporating strategic communications as a core organizational competency. Part Four closes this volume with an examination of what the institute’s extensive research on framing children’s development suggests about the most effective strategies for framing youth specifically. Bales and Franklin D. Gilliam Jr. argue that framing youth issues in terms of their impact on certain topical domains, such as workforce, education, crime, or health, has consequences for issue understanding and policy support. They discuss the evidence that framing youth issues in terms of development opens people up to considering a wide array of policies and programs and avoids the narrow effects of these other domain options. As these articles attest, the findings from this approach are often counterintuitive and run contrary to the “keep it simple” dictum common to communications parlance. We recognize this, and that it takes courage for experts and advocates to tell new and different stories about the social problems that constitute their life work. But we also see how gratifying it is to those who are able to master the practice of evidence-based communications and see their efforts begin to transform the public conversation. We hope that this volume will help other experts, advocates, practitioners, and providers new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd

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see the potential for intentional framing to change the shape of their work, and of the public discourse on behalf of children and youth. The research reported here, conducted by the FrameWorks Institute on the issues of child and youth development, health care, education, and race, was supported by the A. L. Mailman Foundation, Annie E. Casey Foundation, David and Lucile Packard Foundation, DentaQuest Foundation, Endowment for Health New Hampshire, Harvard Center on the Developing Child, Lumina Foundation for Education, Mary Black Foundation, McKnight Foundation, Minnesota Department of Education, Minnesota Department of Human Services, Nellie Mae Education Foundation, University of Minnesota, W. K. Kellogg Foundation, and W. T. Grant Foundation. The FrameWorks Institute dedicates this issue to the FrameWorks chairman emeritus, Robert L. Munroe, research professor of anthropology at Pitzer College, in recognition of his inspirational leadership and his insistence that research and teaching go hand in hand. Lynn Davey Editor LYNN DAVEY is a developmental psychologist and serves as vice president at the FrameWorks Institute in Washington, D.C.

new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd

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Executive Summary

Chapter One: The trouble with issues: The case for intentional framing Susan Nall Bales

Although framing as a process is value neutral, since it can be put to any political, commercial, or ideological purpose, this article shows how it can be used to engage Americans in discussions of public life and how it might be improved. By offering readers a deeper understanding of the pictures in people’s heads that often prevent engagement in issues, the author roots framing in a long history of social and cognitive science scholarship that has addressed the impact of mass media on democratic participation. This article argues that intentional framing can serve as an essential corrective to patterns of thinking in American culture that often preclude considerations of context, systems, and policies and instead advantage explanations of individual effort and worth.

Chapter Two: Strategic Frame Analysis: Providing the “evidence” for evidence-based communications Tiffany Manuel, Lynn Davey

This article describes the five major phases of research associated with Strategic Frame Analysis, an approach to communications research and practice that advances new ways of pursuing social


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change of entrenched and complex social problems. This multimethod approach is characterized by multidisciplinary and iterative research techniques that give emphasis to empirical testing of potential frame effects. The logic behind this constellation of methods and the order in which they are taken up in the research cycle is discussed as an introduction to the articles that follow that review specific parts of the research trajectory.

Chapter Three: The family bubble, achievement gap, and development as competition: Media frames on youth Moira O’Neil

Identifying persistent media frames through a cognitive media analysis is an important step in the empirical measurement of public thinking about social issues. Based on a recent media analysis of racial disparities as they pertain to youth in major U.S. newspapers, this article explains three frames that were persistently evoked in media coverage of youth issues: the family bubble frame—the idea that parents are solely responsible for child outcomes; youth development as a competitive race—the idea that the overarching goal of educational and social development is to make youth more successful than their peers; and the understanding of disparities as achievement gaps. Together these frames promote individualistic understanding of social problems related to youth and limit imaginable solutions to policies that fix individuals rather than broken systems.

Chapter Four: Mapping cultural models and translating expert explanations of child development with simplifying models Nathaniel Kendall-Taylor

How do people reason about issues related to child and youth development? Are the patterns of reasoning in the lay public signew directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd

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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

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nificantly different from the way experts reason about the issue? What can the anthropological theory of cultural models bring to efforts to improve the public’s understanding of child and youth development? In this article, the author explains the methods by which cultural models—the conceptual structures that shape how people perceive and understand their social worlds—are identified and how this mapping process serves as an essential step in closing the gaps between expert and lay understandings of social problems and, ultimately, informing communications strategies.

Chapter Five: From focus groups to peer discourse sessions: The evolution of a method to capture language, meaning, and negotiation Tiffany Manuel, Nathaniel Kendall-Taylor

In this article, the authors describe a unique approach to conducting and analyzing focus groups, described as peer discourse analysis. The primary objective of this analysis is to examine the shape and form of the discourses and negotiations that develop organically among peers in discussions of social issues. Peer discourse analysis has both descriptive and prescriptive utility, as it is also used to experiment with frames that might improve people’s understanding of complex social problems.

Chapter Six: Who says your frames are better than mine? Making the case for strategic framing by using the power of experimental research Tiffany Manuel

This article details the experimental research on frame effects that provides quantitative evidence that some types of frames have a greater ability to move and affect policy support than others. This method is particularly useful in showing the magnitude by which new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd

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exposure to alternative ways of thinking about social issues alters the public’s policy preferences. This kind of evidence-based approach to communications is a key to success in providing definitive evidence that strategic framing makes a difference in determining the outcome that matters most to policy advocates: public support.

Chapter Seven: From research to practice: Communications for social change Lynn Davey

What happens when the research inquiry is complete and has determined which reframes will be most successful in improving public understanding of an issue and advancing policy goals? Simple dissemination of research findings is not sufficient to improve the communications capacity of the field. The author explains how cognitive science and social movements literatures form the foundation of this field-building practice of strategic framing pedagogy.

Chapter Eight: Framing in the field: A case study Diane Benjamin

Strategic Frame Analysis can inform the daily practice of policy advocates by bringing an evidence-based communications approach to their work. This case study of FrameWorks’ decade-long association with the national Kids Count Network shares stories from advocates who are transforming their communications strategies, resulting in more effective advocacy for child and youth well-being.


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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

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Chapter Nine: Campaigning for children’s oral health: A case study Kate Vaughan

Arguably, the ultimate application of evidenced-based communications is translating the research recommendations into a fullfledged media campaign. This article explains the development and implementation of Watch Your Mouth, a campaign based on FrameWorks Institute’s research on children’s oral health. To date, this innovative campaign has been implemented in four states, with impressive results. Combining paid and earned media activity with community organizing and policy advocacy helped each state change the public perception of children’s oral health as a largely cosmetic concern to a legitimate children’s health issue.

Chapter Ten: Strategic Framing Study Circles: Toward a gold standard of framing pedagogy Jane Feinberg

This article explains how communities of practice have been developed as part of FrameWorks’ field-building efforts. Strategic Framing Study Circles, as they are known, have been conducted with four statewide coalitions, one group of national organizations, and an emerging regional coalition. The goal of each community of practice is to build among participants a solid base of framing skills and competencies and to help them understand that despite varied organizational agendas, they can share a frame to tremendous collective advantage.


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Chapter Eleven: Embracing the long view: A funder’s perspective on Strategic Frame Analysis Jane Feinberg, Curt McPhail

This interview between a member of the FrameWorks staff and a long-time funder of FrameWorks research and field building highlights the critical role that communications can play in maximizing philanthropy’s long-term impact in the social sector, even—or perhaps especially—in times of economic scarcity and retrenchment. The interview captures the evolution of one foundation’s communications strategy, from traditional public relations to an approach based in the tenets of Strategic Framing Analysis, and underscores the challenge of sustaining a framing practice among its grantees.

Chapter Twelve: Lessons from the story of early child development: Domain decisions and framing youth development Susan Nall Bales, Franklin D. Gilliam Jr.

This article maintains that effective communications strategy derives from a complex understanding of frame coherence. In particular, this understanding calls for a closer examination of the ways in which the “pictures in people’s heads” are activated by exposure to a key arena of frame contestation: the issue domain. Drawing from FrameWorks’ research on child development, the authors show that by choosing to align child development with specific domains, advocates may serve to further entrench public thinking in ways that imperil expert policy recommendations. Parallel cautions are drawn for youth issues, with further research from the FrameWorks portfolio. While aligning child and adolescent development with health, workforce, or education may result in further news coverage to those policies, research suggests it may also depress support for those same public policies.


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Despite the best efforts of youth development researchers, communications research demonstrates how the pictures in people’s heads are likely to trump incoming information; framing intentionally to overcome barriers to comprehension is advised, based on a robust literature in the cognitive and social sciences.

1 The trouble with issues: The case for intentional framing Susan Nall Bales The only feeling that anyone can have about an event he does not experience is the feeling aroused by his mental image of that event. That is why until we know what others think they know, we cannot truly understand their acts. Walter Lippmann (1922)1

that many readers unfamiliar with framing will approach this volume with questions about the category into which it fits.2 Is framing legitimate social science? Is it marketing? Is it wordsmithing? If readers assign framing to any of these convenient and readily available categories, as theory would predict they will be inclined to do, there is little chance that SCHEMA THEORY WOULD PREDICT


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the articles in this volume will realize their potential to influence the practice of communicating findings about youth development. Framing, at least in the way that FrameWorks conceives of it, does not fit these categories. Thus, it is imperative to define at the outset what it means to do framing, what disciplines and literatures it claims, and what values attend its practice. Framing needs some reframing. Although framing as a process is value neutral, since it can be put to any political, commercial, or ideological purpose, the articles in this volume demonstrate its value to public discourse. We show how framing can be used to engage Americans in discussions of public life and how it might be improved. This article argues that intentional framing can serve as an essential corrective to patterns of thinking in American culture that often preclude considerations of context, systems, and policies and instead advantage explanations of individual effort and worth. Framing can, we demonstrate, restore a bit of a “sociological imagination” to a population that is constantly and almost exclusively exposed to stories of autonomy and individual responsibility.3 In this sense, the multimethod, multidisciplinary approach used by FrameWorks, Strategic Frame Analysis, is more closely aligned with the goals of civic engagement than it is with the goals of persuasion.4 Perhaps no other issue in the FrameWorks portfolio provides greater insight into the challenges that confront prospective communicators than does our research on how Americans think about youth. It is now well established that people get most of their information about public affairs from the news media.5 Following this, we might expect the narratives to which Americans are exposed to play an important role in their understanding of social issues.6 In a study of the content of news reporting about youth, FrameWorks’ researchers found the three most frequently reported topics of youth news on local television stations were crime victimization, accidents involving young people, and violent juvenile crime, accounting for nearly half (46 percent) of all coverage of youth. Five other frequently reported topics were also negative: property crimes committed by juveniles, domestic violence or sexual abuse, alcohol abuse, individual health problems, and other risk behaviors. Overall the study concluded that “together, these eight topics, new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd

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THE TROUBLE WITH ISSUES

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which all emphasize the dangers and negative outcomes associated with youth, accounted for nearly 60 percent of all discussions of youth.”7 Understanding frame effects is reliant on more than what people know or what is chronically accessible to them.8 It also requires us to ask: What is missing from their cognitive landscape? If media are storytellers, how can we also bring to mind what is consistently left out of the frame and therefore chronically inaccessible? The answers to these questions emerge from a parallel study of the portrayal of youth in entertainment media. In an analysis of one episode from each prime-time entertainment series aired on six broadcast networks over six weeks in fall 1999 (ninety-two episodes in all), FrameWorks researchers found not one example of a young person involved in a societal issue.9 Nor were they engaged in that most basic of American activities: work. Fewer than 10 percent of youth characters were shown doing chores at home or working. Instead, the most common activity in which teens were seen to engage was socializing. Even when at school, teens were twice as likely to be shown socializing as engaged in academic work. Is it any wonder that Americans find positive youth development “hard to think,” as Lévi-Strauss once described those cultural ideas that are sketchy and lie outside the boundaries of an established cognitive system?10 To the question that some might raise, Does the fact that FrameWorks manipulates frames in the laboratory equate to the manipulation of public opinion? we would answer that the question has meaning only when one ignores the shaping effects of culture. The FrameWorks approach strongly suggests that, ironically, it is when social science communicators ignore the internalized cultural models that Americans bring to the topic of youth development that they fail to educate and engage Americans. Respecting public opinion means figuring out how to reveal to ordinary people what has been lost in the translation from the experts’ eye to the public narrative. Unfortunately, since we are not in the end rational actors, such a process of reframing relies necessarily on the study of folk models, of heuristics and mental short-cuts to provide the missing information that can allow ordinary Americans to rethink the issues new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd

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that confront the country and reimagine the solutions that correspond to their vision of the good society.11 In this article, I demonstrate why I believe this to be so, drawing from a diverse literature in the cognitive and social sciences. The authors of the articles that follow demonstrate how we see these frame effects, both positive and negative, manifest themselves in research, in the practice of frame sponsors, and in everyday communication.

The pictures in people’s heads It was Lippmann who first posed the idea of communications as inserting a pseudo-environment between man and his environment.12 “We shall assume that what each man does,” he wrote, “is based not on direct and certain knowledge, but on pictures made by himself or given to him. . . . The way in which the world is imagined determines at any particular moment what men will do. . . . To that pseudo-environment his behavior is a response. But because it is behavior, the consequences, if they are acts, operate not in the pseudo-environment where the behavior is stimulated, but in the real environment where action eventuates.”13 If we are to understand the mental representations on which Americans act on social issues from global warming to youth development, we must undertake a systematic study of the interaction between the images to which they are exposed and the incorporation of those images into their cognitive repertoire. The way we do this is by analyzing social discourse as a cultural product: “talk in” in the form of news media, advertising, entertainment, and other forms of public communication, and “talk out” in the form of individual interviews, peer discussion, and public opinion. Following the canon of cognitive anthropology, we look for the pictures in people’s heads by using cultural analysis to reconstruct meaning, “and especially cultural meaning, from the clues provided by discourse.”14 Analyzing discourse is a daunting task given the volume of the cultural product. But here we are interested in that aspect of the cultural product that influences public affairs and the connew directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd

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struction of public opinion about social issues. To capture and categorize the kinds of pictures to which one is exposed and the effects that such exposure might have on public decision making, FrameWorks finds C. Wright Mills’s distinction between two views of social problems useful in this regard: that “troubles” and their resolution reside within the individual and his or her personal experience and actions, and “issues” are matters that transcend the individual and are instead matters that relate to social organization. Issues are public matters; troubles are private matters.15 In sum, we are interested in both issues and the degree to which they are portrayed as troubles, that is, defined at the individual level of responsibility. Iyengar mirrors Mills’s typology in his landmark studies of frames in the news and their effects on public thinking. His concepts of episodic and thematic frames roughly conform to Mills’s distinction between troubles and issues: The episodic news frame depicts public issues in terms of concrete instances, such as the plight of a homeless person, a teen suicide. It contributes to attributions of responsibility that lie with the individual, rather than society, by portraying an issue or problem as an isolated or random incident. Thematic news frames place public issues in some more general or abstract context, directing attention to general outcomes or conditions, such as reports on changes in government welfare expenditures or declining funding for after-school programs. Thematic framing tends to elicit more attributions of societal responsibility because it depicts the context in which events take place and the broader societal forces that shape them.16 In a series of media content analyses over the years, Iyengar has demonstrated that television news is heavily tipped toward episodic reporting.17 FrameWorks’ own media content analyses of social issues confirm this. An evaluation of more than eight thousand stories about youth issues on fifteen local news stations nationwide over the course of several weeks in 1999 concluded that “reports that discussed broader or more contextual and thematic information about youth were quite rare, accounting for only one out of every fourteen stories (7 percent) overall.”18 While national news proved more thematic overall (52 percent of stories in this small new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd

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sample were thematic), youth were relatively invisible. On other topics, like education, where FrameWorks’ own media content analyses have yielded more thematic depiction of the issues—in a recent study, as much as 46 percent of all stories were thematic— the depiction of solutions was highly episodic. That is, when it came to describing the consequences of inaction, individual students constituted 81 percent of the mentions, reversing the thematic trend.19 The pseudo-environment that depicts youth development, then, is one in which the spotlight is relentlessly focused on the individual actor who has, to borrow Mills’s phrase, “troubles,” not “issues.” In a consumer culture, the pseudo-environment is an “individualist environment.”20 Furthermore, Iyengar has been able to show that this pseudoenvironment, created by a dominance of episodic stories, takes its toll on the real environment of public decision making, just as Lippmann suggested. Exposure to the culture’s narratives has effects on public thinking, and these narratives become the vehicle into which we pour our own experiences. As we tell stories about our own youth, we learn to do so within the construct of the culture’s formats.21 The ready adoption of these formats is not without consequence. In a series of controlled experimental studies in which citizens are exposed to either thematic or episodic news stories, Iyengar and his colleagues demonstrated that subjects who were exposed to episodic news frames on social issues, from crime to poverty to racial inequality, attributed responsibility for these problems to individuals. When they were exposed to thematic frames about social problems, attributions of responsibility were more likely to focus on government programs, political actors, and economic conditions.22 Extending this conclusion to issues related to youth development, one would expect the public to hold individual young people (and their parents) accountable for the situations they confront, from high school attrition to unemployment to depression. This is precisely what FrameWorks’ researchers found in their studies of American opinion about youth.23 Of course, exposure to media and its storytelling power is not confined to news. Studies of advertising yield further insight into the worldviews being espoused by mass media. In a study of the new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd

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impact of advertising on American society, Schudson concludes that the power of advertising comes from the simplicity of its message: the glorification of consumer choice. And this ubiquitous message, he asserts, influences the way people understand the world in domains far removed from the purchase of goods. Consumerism and its symbolic universe become reference points for many aspects of culture. Schudson’s analysis contends that “the satisfactions portrayed are invariably private, even if they are familiar or social; they do not invoke public or collective values. They offer a public portraiture of ideas and values consistent with the promotion of a social order in which people are encouraged to think of themselves and their private worlds.”24 It is because of this singularity of message that Ellul concludes that American media constitute a “sociological propaganda” in that they are “based on a general climate, an atmosphere that influences people imperceptibly without having the appearance of propaganda; it gets to man through his customs, through his most unconscious habits. It creates new habits in him; it is a sort of persuasion from within. As a result, man adopts new criteria of judgment and choice, adopts them spontaneously, as if he had chosen them himself.” Such propaganda, enshrined in culture, serves to advance a unified concept of what defines the necessities of life in order to support mass consumption.25 As the saying goes, American media exist to “deliver eyeballs to advertisers.”26 This propaganda, or cultural orientation, plays out every day in the increasingly blended arena of modern American media, where infomercials and video news releases mix with entertainment, and cause-related marketing abuts news in a stew of exposure that even the most media-attentive and media-literate American would find hard to distinguish.27 Indeed, it is a truism of public opinion research that people cannot accurately describe the source of the media they observed; they routinely identify an issue as having appeared on television, for example, when no advertising or news on that topic appeared in that venue. So when Chevron puts forward a solution to energy conservation that reads, “I will finally get a programmable thermostat,” such a solution serves to reinforce new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd

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preexisting biases toward the individual level of responsibility— solutions that will be further reified in news: “I will use solar power . . . I will bike to work.”28 Thus, an important, if often overlooked, bias in American media depictions of social issues is toward individualist thinking and individual responsibility for social problems. For youth development scholars and advocates, such a bias is problematic. It means that the American public is predisposed to regard a new report about youth crime as further evidence in support of the (now chronically accessible) perception that the values of American families and their children are declining. Moreover, this inclination to find the victim or perpetrator will likely obscure the larger context in which young people thrive or fail and the conditioning influences that matter. Following the goals for American media enumerated by the scholars above, the call to action that is implicit, if not explicit, in these stories will be consumerist in nature: products and programs can be found to “fix” the individuals who lack the character or qualities needed to triumph over circumstances. The result is that programs that tell one how to find a designated driver are cognitively advantaged over programs that might attempt to regulate alcohol advertising in media for teens.

What is wrong with this picture? Such a cultural predisposition toward individual explanations for social problems and individual actions to correct them might not pose a problem at all if such an evaluation of social problems and solutions squared with the opinions of experts. That does not appear to be the case when one examines the scholarly literature on youth development, public health, or public policy. Put simply, although individual responsibility is indeed important in determining the success of individuals and societies, it is far from a complete explanation; such an explanation for most social scientists would require attention to the social determinants of health and new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd

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educational outcomes, as well as considerations of the influence of socioeconomic status and race, among other factors, on the ability of various groups to climb the American ladder of success. Confronted with questions about problems associated with youth development, experts are more likely to cite contextual factors like the following:29 • At no other time have people of different ages spent large amounts of concentrated time in their day-to-day routines with same age peers. • Few young people have even one significant, close relationship with a nonfamilial adult before reaching adulthood themselves. Youth development researchers report that “rates of negative behaviors differ across neighborhoods that are identical in ethnic composition and poverty rates, but vary in residential stability, density of personal networks, and presence of formal institutions such as churches or voluntary associations.”30 Social epidemiologists have put forward numerous studies to demonstrate that “characteristics of places where people live have an influence on health independent of the characteristics of the people in them. . . . Few personal characteristics are truly exogenous to the social environment.”31 Public health experts agree that the places that surround people have important shaping influences on individual and group outcomes. The California Endowment put it this way: Too many of California’s communities lack the basic ingredients for health. When schools are not built within a safe walking distance of where families live, children get less daily exercise. More driving to school and work means more air pollution and fewer opportunities for exercise. More air pollution means more asthmatic attacks. More asthma means even less physical activity, more days absent from school and work, and a higher cost of health care for everyone. This is just one example of how the sometimes random planning of our surroundings can negatively affect the health and well-being of children and families, stifle the life of


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a community and drain the collective promise of our state. These challenges take many forms—obesity and diabetes, unemployment, neighborhood and family violence—threatening economically disadvantaged communities more than others.32

To familiarize themselves with such an approach to youth development, however, would require Americans to acquire “pictures in their heads” that are not routinely available to them, as the media content analyses above demonstrate. To appreciate what is or is not available in the everyday environments of young people would require a massive restructuring of the pseudo-environment—one that would begin to balance the depictions of individuals and their “troubles” with attention to places, conditions, and issues.

Reframing as lens cleansing If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thru narrow chinks of his cavern. —William Blake

Within this context of an American cultural predisposition to individualist explanations, one of the tasks of reframing issues of public affairs comes in defogging the lens to allow people to see sociopolitical phenomena as contributing factors to individual and group outcomes. One might term this a kind of balance, not unlike the idea journalists use to ensure that partisan ideologies are given equal coverage. But this kind of balance is about getting more environment into the pictures in our heads in order to better approximate the actual world of interactive influences that scholars perceive. FrameWorks systematically explores what cognitive barriers prohibit ordinary Americans from seeing a more complex landscape on which individual outcomes play out. One might define these as concepts that are hard to discern because they lie far outside the boundaries of the common cultural landscapes promoted in new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd

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the media and reinforced in public discourse. When we translate unfamiliar concepts into people’s ordinary daily routines using metaphors and familiar values, we begin to align the unfamiliar with the familiar and to bring abstract concepts into people’s ordinary experiences. This is the work of reframing and the task that frame elements—familiar values, messengers, metaphors, and so on—accomplish for us. Importantly, this balancing act or redirection of attention is not achieved by adding facts in the literal sense of the word. Rather, it is achieved by the ability of a message to structure meaning, to signify, to reveal a different sense of the world. As FrameWorks is wont to advise would-be frame sponsors, rebutting is not reframing. But neither is a traditional style of academic argumentation where the student is left to come to a conclusion on the basis of reasoned judgment. This is, moreover, the fallacy of many community engagement activities that ignore reframing, such as public dialogue, group messaging, and public dissemination strategies. In the case of many public dialogue projects, the goal is to facilitate a solution or an approach to a particular sociopolitical issue that emerges from the population. When these discussions ignore the “pictures in people’s heads,” they do little to liberate the public from its internalized stereotypes and self-limiting perspectives. In FrameWorks’ own research using peer discourse analysis (for more on this method, see the article by Manuel and KendallTaylor in this volume), we observe how new ideas, facts, and approaches are trumped by the robust cultural models people have internalized from the common experiences and exposures to media. This is precisely what happened in our attempted reframes of youth issues. As we have reported elsewhere,33 over the course of six focus groups with parents, we observed astonishing unanimity in the way adults discounted positive statistics about youth. In what we have called the “graveyard of framing hypotheses,” we have demonstrated how seemingly logical approaches to engaging Americans in youth policies failed to do more than evoke the dominant frames of individualism and “troubles.” Rebutting the negative statistics with positive data resulted in public rejection of the latter. Even the new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd

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portrayal of youth working resulted not in an assessment of youth values and the opportunities available to them but rather in a further connection to their consumerism: they were deemed to be working for the wrong reasons. In retrospect, we would now argue that none of these reframing strategies confronted the fundamental shift that needed to be achieved if Americans were to see beyond the pseudo-environment that puts forward relentless images of the bad or defective teen. The lens remained too narrow; the cultural fog continued to obscure. It was only when we began to experiment with frames that put young people into collective environments that FrameWorks researchers were able to see changes in the discourse: young people doing group sports, engaged in community volunteer work, in performing arts ensembles. That is, when young people became part of a collective and showed a mutual sense of responsibility for something in which they were embedded, adults valued both their individual effort and the group’s influence and collective worth. The discussions that emerged following exposure to these frames were significantly different from those that adults offered up without an orienting frame. Moreover, in subsequent quantitative research, FrameWorks found statistically significant impacts on support for investing in youth when people were first exposed to images of youth in performance arts, group sports, and volunteer activities. From these studies, we conclude that the reframes worked because they put young people in a more collective landscape of influences and environments and helped people shift from easy-to-think individualist cultural models to existing but more hard-to-think models of collective purpose. They provided some of the missing cognitive material people needed in order to reconsider their bird’s-eye view on American individualism. Because of findings like these, we conclude that reframing is a democratic art, a way of getting the bowling alley and the bowling league back into the sights of those who have been bowling alone for too long.34, 35 Overall, the Strategic Frame Analysis rebalances the equation between individual and collective explanations for specific new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd

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outcomes that is seriously awry in American cultural representations and to do this by reminding people of a broader view that too often eludes them and with which they have too little practice using in their thinking. When we are able to provide more context, illuminate the shaping forces of place and policies, and connect individuals to institutions and systems, we provide a needed corrective to the unidimensional pseudo-environment. In this sense, reframing is reengaging. For scholars of youth development, youth policy experts, and advocates, the stakes are very high indeed. Without intentional framing, the public is left with few examples of how systems and policies could work to improve the lives of young people. Moreover, lost in the pseudo-environment of American individualism, they are most likely to read individual responsibility into the lines of any report about youth. And because we all live in this culture, there is the fact that the frames are also part of our own personal and professional discourses and habits of storytelling. Framing intentionally means making sure that powerful signs are raised early in a communication to help ordinary people find their way through the thicket of stereotypes toward the solutions that experts believe merit their consideration. Framing research ensures that these signs are robust and memorable, appropriately directive, and supportive of systems changes. The articles that follow demonstrate in greater detail how frames and reframes work to support or impede the findings of social policy researchers. Notes 1. Lippmann, W. (1922). Public opinion. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company. P. 13. 2. See Schallert, D. L. (1982). The significance of knowledge: A synthesis of research related to schema theory. In W. Otto & S. White (Eds.), Reading expository material. New York: Academic Press. 3. Mills, C. W. (1961). The sociological imagination. New York: Grove Press. 4. For more about Strategic Frame Analysis, see www.frameworksinstitute.org/sfa.html or Gilliam, F. D., & Bales, S. N. (2001). Strategic frame analysis: Reframing America’s youth. Social Policy Report, 15(3), 3–15. 5. See Papper, R., & Gerhard, M. (1997). Newsrooms still earn profits. Communicator, 7–8; Roper Starch Worldwide. (1994). Roper Reports, 93, 22–23.


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6. See Bruner, J. (1986). Acts of meaning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 7. Amundsen, D., Lichter, L., & Lichter, S. R. (2005). What’s the matter with kids today: Television coverage of adolescents in America. Washington, DC: FrameWorks Institute. 8. See Higgins, E. T. (1996). Knowledge activation: accessibility, applicability, and salience. In E. T. Higgins & A. N. Kruglianski (Eds.), Social psychology: Handbook of basic principles. Orlando, FL: Academic Press. 9. Heintz-Knowles, K. (2000). Images of youth: A content analysis of adolescents in prime time entertainment programming. Washington, DC: FrameWorks Institute. 10. Lévi-Strauss, C. (1963). Totemism. Boston: Beacon Press. P. 89. 11. See Gigerenzer, G., Todd, P. M., & and ABC Research Group. (1999). Simple heuristics that make us smart. New York: Oxford University Press. 12. Lippmann, W. (1922). P. 15. 13. Lippmann. (1922). Pp. 15, 25. 14. Quinn, N. (Ed.). (2005). Finding culture in talk. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. P. 4. 15. Mills. (1961). Pp. 8–9. 16. Iyengar, S. (1991). Is anyone responsible? How television frames political issues. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. P. 14. 17. Iyengar. (1991). 18. Amundsen, D., Lichter, L., & Lichter, S. R. (2005). P. 3. 19. Center for Media and Public Affairs. (2009). Put your pencils down: Media coverage of education reform, 2007–2008. Washington, DC: FrameWorks Institute. 20. Douglas, M., & Isherwood, B. (1996) The world of goods: Toward an anthropology of consumption. New York: Routledge. P. 21. 21. See Schank, R. C. (1998). Tell me a story: narrative and intelligence. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. 22. FrameWorks Institute. (2009). How framing influences citizen understanding of public issues: An interview with Shanto Iyengar. Retrieved May 28, 2009, from http://www.frameworksinstitute.org. 23. See Bales, S. N. (2001). Reframing youth issues for public consideration and support: A FrameWorks Message Memo. Washington, DC: FrameWorks Institute. 24. Schudson, M. (1996). Advertising, the uneasy persuasion: Its dubious impact on American society. New York: Basic Books. P. xix. 25. Ellul, J. (1965). Propaganda: The formation of men’s attitudes. New York: Random House. P. 68. 26. An exhaustive online search failed to reveal the origin of this quote; it has become a truism in advertising and is widely used to describe the goal of advertising. 27. See Jamieson, K. H., & Campbell, K. K. (1997). The interplay of influence: News, advertising, politics, and the mass media. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. 28. See http://www.willyoujoinus.com for the full array of ads. 29. Data cited in Camino, L., & Zeldin, S. (2002). From periphery to center: Pathways for youth civic engagement in the day-to-day life of communities. Applied Developmental Science, 6(4), 213–220. new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd

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30. Youniss, J., & Ruth, A. (2002). Approaching policy for adolescent development in the 21st century. In J. T. Mortimer & R. Larson (Eds.), The changing adolescent experience: Societal trends and the transition to adulthood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. P. 263. 31. Kawachi, I., & Berkman, L. (Eds.). (2003). Neighborhoods and health. New York: Oxford University Press. P. 10. 32. See Building Healthy Communities: California Living 2.0 at http://www. calendow.org. 33. Gilliam & Bales. (2001). 34. See Putnam, R. (2000). Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community. New York: Simon and Schuster. 35. Olds, J., & Schwartz, R. (2009). The lonely American. Boston: Beacon Press. SUSAN NALL bales is president and founder of the FrameWorks Institute and a visiting scientist in the Department of Society, Human Development, and Health at the Harvard School of Public Health.


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A discussion of the five major phases of inquiry associated with this evidence-based approach to communications can provide youth development practitioners a clearer understanding of what an empirical process can bring to the work of social change advocacy.

2 Strategic Frame Analysis: Providing the “evidence” for evidence-based communications Tiffany Manuel, Lynn Davey “Oh,” Becca stopped me cold. “I was with you when you said it’s about people who try to do good, and if that’s what it’s about, I’d like to read it. But if it’s about politics, no, I’m sorry, I won’t read it.” For those of us who care deeply about politics, Becca’s dismissal ought to set off alarms. At the same time, though, her reaction offers the most important clue to the problems that worry us—growing apathy, declining political participation, decaying democracy. In order to get people like Becca to care about politics, we need to reconnect government with helping people and doing good.1

for several decades, a great deal of attention in both academic and public discourse has been focused on the state of citizen engagement in public life. As Skocpol and Fiorina argued over a decade ago, America witnessed a host of contradictory political


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developments in the latter half of the twentieth century.2 Some of these have advanced democracy (among them, increased political participation by historically marginalized groups and, more recently, increased voter participation by nonwhite and youth groups in the 2008 presidential election), and some have challenged the ideals and practice of democracy (for example, the rise in political power of special interest groups, an often cited declining trust in the federal government and elected officials).3 The meaning of these contradictory trends has been discussed not only among political commentators but by scholars as well. First, perhaps, was James Coleman, in his analysis of demographic shifts, who argued that these trends might put at risk the next generation’s development of essential social capital—or the norms, values, and conventional understandings that form the consensus underpinnings of adult society and work to ensure social participation and future economic capital.4 Later came Robert Putnam’s assertion that declining participation in civic and community associations was leading to the erosion of social capital in American society.5 Whether in response to real or perceived trends, there is no doubt that American society has witnessed a rise in overt institutional calls for “social capital,” “deliberative democracy,” and “civic education and engagement,” all of which seek to get at the same issue: public engagement in a wide variety of facets of American social life.6 As political sociologist Richard Flacks astutely observed, “Our culture provides very weak motivational bases for political participation . . . [while] the strongest motivational structures developed in our culture are those that energize people toward private life and personal fulfillment.”7 In this vein, advancing public engagement can be understood as a process of changing how people see and understand the nature of social problems, how they envision potential remedies to those problems, and ultimately how they attribute responsibility for solving those problems. Since 1999, the nonprofit FrameWorks Institute has used this approach by conducting communications research to identify how best to engage the public in more productive discourse about new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd

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social problems. FrameWorks has done this by investigating how Americans think about a range of social issues, from adolescent development to global warming and race, and how scientists, policy experts, and advocates can communicate more effectively about these issues so that the public can envision and engage in solutions. Strategic Frame Analysis, developed by the FrameWorks Institute, is an approach to communications that integrates essential constructs from the cognitive and social sciences into evidencebased research and practice. The goal of strategic frame analysis is to document and deconstruct the frames currently in the public consciousness on an issue and to understand the impact of frames on public policy preferences. In addition, it allows us to test and validate, across methods, both damaging or unproductive frames and constructive reframes that might further the salience of an issue. For example, depending on the frame used in a news story, people can think about after-school programming as either warehousing for youth in the “prime time for crime” or as developmental opportunities. This lens on the issue quickly defines issue understanding, priority, consequences, solutions, and responsibility for fixing the problem. In this example, research might be deployed to discover whether crime prevention or development was indeed a dominant frame of understanding, to isolate the cues in media and conversation that appear to trigger each pattern of thinking, and to determine the solutions that ordinary people find relevant when thinking in each way. FrameWorks research investigations are multimethod, multidisciplinary, iterative processes that emphasize empirical testing of frame effects on public understanding. This process is necessary to support descriptive and prescriptive investigations of the power and potential of strategically crafted frames. This article provides an overview of the five major conceptual phases of inquiry at the institute and briefly reviews the array of methods that constitute those phases, as discussed in detail in the subsequent articles in this volume. new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd

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Phase I: Pump the swamp The initial phase of research at the institute is centered on exploring the “swamp of public understanding” or, more simply put, to understand the wide range of opinions, arguments, frames, and discourses that the public is regularly exposed to on a given social problem. Since public media remain the primary source of information about public policy for average Americans, “pumping” the swamp begins with media content analyses, an important empirical measurement of the frames that shape public thinking about an issue (see the article by O’Neil in this volume). In addition, we use peer discourse sessions and cognitive interviews with the public to discover the contents of the swamp. Media Content Analyses The news media are the primary source of information about public affairs for most Americans. Identifying the content of the media discourse on an issue permits an analysis of the scope of coverage, but also the relative consistency or inconsistency of media frames on an issue and the implicit assumptions these frames convey to the public. By exploring the subtle patterns in the way the media frame issues, media content analyses help generate hypotheses about what patterns of reasoning on issues might be more or less accessible to the public. These analyses reveal the link between the information that swirls constantly around individuals and how they think about and process information on an issue. To discern this link, or connection between media frames and public thinking on issues, we focus on two types of analyses: (1) descriptive media content analyses that outline the broad scope of media coverage accorded an issue during a particular period (focusing on the types and number of stories typically covered about an issue, variety in primary sources used to inform media reports, and so on) and (2) more inferential media content analyses (which we term cognitive media analyses) that delineate the dominant frames typically used in media coverage as well as how those frames shape, facilitate, or otherwise constrain public thinking new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd

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about potential solutions to social problems. The result is an analysis that characterizes the patterns of media presentation on any particular issue and speculates about the effects of exposure to these news tropes on public thinking. Cognitive interviews We then turn to a rigorous analysis of the shape of the public’s thinking about an issue through individual, semistructured, exploratory cognitive interviews. This research is based on principles and data-gathering methods adapted from the fields of cognitive anthropology and cognitive linguistics. The primary outcome of these interviews is an initial inventory of the most readily accessible and dominant cultural models that are activated when Americans think and talk about a given issue. The interviews use a structured guide but an open format that allows the interviewee to move freely around the topics on the guide. In these interviews, FrameWorks is looking not for what people say about social issues but rather how they talk about social issues—in other words, not the specific content of opinions but the underlying patterns of thinking that characterize those opinions. Peer discourse analysis As frames move into the public square, they become subject to group negotiation. Peer discourse sessions are conducted to validate the findings from individual interviews, experiment with promising alternative frames, and observe the negotiations among people when they are exposed to various frames. Similar in some ways to focus groups, peer discourse sessions are moderated groups, typically consisting of engaged citizens (people who are registered to vote, news attentive, or volunteer in their communities), and varied by gender, education, parental status, and other characteristics relevant to the topic. The group discussions are recorded, transcribed, and analyzed for full and thorough analysis. This results in a written report that captures the effects of frame cues on group dynamics and intergroup negotiations. (For a thorough explication of this method, see the article by Manuel and Kendall-Taylor in this volume.) new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd

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Phase II: Map the gap The second phase of research centers on mapping the gap between expert and lay understandings of an issue. More specifically, the objective is to understand the ways that experts and advocates explain social issues and discern whether that varies significantly from the dominant cultural models that the public brings to bear on an issue (which have been documented in the cognitive interviews and peer discourses sessions in phase I). In these analyses, we specifically look for incongruity between experts’ and the lay public’s conceptualization issues and hypothesize how to bring those perspectives into closer alignment. Interviews of policy experts and advocates and reviews of materials To better understand how experts and advocates think and communicate about the social issue, we interview them, attend their professional meetings, and analyze an array of their publicly focused materials. Using the data from these sources, we often draft a core expert story on the issue that articulates the central principles and constructs that experts wish to advance to the public to improve their understanding. The goal of the next phases of research, which is to make expert knowledge understandable, interesting, and usable to the public, depends heavily on a solid foundational understanding of this core story of expert knowledge, so intensive attention is given to constructing a coherent narrative.

Phase III: Expose and close the holes Once we have good data mapping the contours of understanding of experts or advocates and the public, we do additional research to establish how intentional framing can close the gap between public and expert understandings. This stage of the research seeks to determine how framing strategies can distill the complex expert understanding of issues into narratives that can be assimilated by ordinary Americans. Most issues that FrameWorks investigates are abstract, policy-oriented problems that require Americans to new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd

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understand causality, consequences, and conditions before they can meaningfully consider policies that can address the problem. This phase of research allows us to experiment with new ways of shifting and structuring the public conversation so that these causes, consequences, and conditions become more accessible to the public’s evaluations and judgments. Simplifying models development Distilling expert knowledge often requires the development of what FrameWorks terms a “simplifying model” to aid effective communications (see the article by Kendall-Taylor in this volume). Simplifying models are a kind of metaphorical frame that capture the essence of a scientific concept and have a high capacity for spreading through a population. Numerous studies in the cognitive sciences have established that both the development and the learning of complex, abstract, or technical concepts typically rely on metaphor and analogies.8 An explanation that reduces a complex problem to a simple, concrete analogy or metaphor contributes to understanding by helping people organize information into a clear picture in their heads, including facts and ideas previously learned but not organized in a coherent way. For example, our research on early childhood development revealed that the public has no coherent organizing principle with which to consider how children develop. The simplifying models research discerned that the metaphorical model of brain architecture facilitated understanding. Specifically, the simplifying model communicates the concept that brains have an architecture and are built from the bottom up, with early experiences contributing to either a sturdy or a fragile foundation. Once this analogical picture has been formed, it becomes the basis for new reasoning about the topic. Designing and selecting an effective simplifying model requires determining beforehand the patterns of reasoning in the targeted group. The cultural models interviews in phase I are conducted in part to surface the obstacles (and opportunities) that bear on the public’s ability to reason about this issue. By identifying precisely what people already correctly understand, falsely believe, and do not yet understand, the interviews allow us to target the simplifying new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd

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model precisely and economically. Moreover, by comparing this to expert understandings of the same issues, we can focus on what core information needs to be conveyed in order to help people arrive at a proximate understanding that is consistent with that of experts. The earlier research is used to generate a broad list of dozens of candidate-simplifying models, targeting the missing or erroneous conceptual steps in current thinking. The list is arrived at using linguistic and narrative analysis of data from phases I and II of the research process. We then winnow the field, holding the candidate models to account in further qualitative and quantitative methods. By measuring and comparing subjects’ acceptance of and facility with different metaphorical models—as they try to explain and reason about the target issue—we can judge how effectively particular models will be absorbed and used once they are introduced to the public. Survey research strongly suggests that when these mechanistic models are combined with appropriate values cues, they lift public comprehension and policy support of abstract concepts and policies.

Phase IV: Reframe the blame Researchers at FrameWorks emerge from phase III with a set of simplifying models and other frame elements that have been shown to narrow the gap of understanding between the public and experts or advocates on a social issue. That is, we can show that the public has a better understanding of the issues because of the models and additional frame elements. To provide stronger evidence that some types of reframes have a greater ability to move and affect policy support than others, we use experimental surveys. Experimental surveys The primary purpose of the experimental research we conduct on frame effects is to provide empirical evidence that informs communications recommendations to advocates and policy experts about the efficacy of using some frames over others (for more on this method, see the article by Manuel in this volume). To conduct new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd

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these experiments, we employ Web-based surveys and randomly assign a nationally representative sample to one or more treatments and a control group. The treatment groups are assigned a passage to read that frames a social issue in a particular way, and subsequently those in the sample are asked a series of question that tap the approval/disapproval dichotomy on a variety of related policy questions. By comparing the responses of the treatment groups to the control condition (which received no stimulus at all), we can ascertain any effects that emerge because of the way in which the issues were framed in the stimuli. Using this method, we can demonstrate the magnitude and extent to which exposure to alternative frames affects the public’s policy preferences. Peer discourse analysis Peer discourse sessions are used following this experimental research to refine the reframes, investigate findings from the quantitative work that were not intuitive, and deepen the conclusions we draw about the use of frames tested. The format of these groups is the same as in other phases of the research, but the overall objective here is to refine rather than to explore frames.

Phase V: Seal the deal The final stage of the research process is the hand-off of the findings from the research to the field-building staff who teach advocates how to incorporate the research findings into communications practice. The translation of the research into practice is the subject of the article by Davey in this volume.

Conclusion Under the rubric of Strategic Frame Analysis, FrameWorks pursues investigations that are multimethod, multidisciplinary, and iterative, and the findings from each method are incorporated into and used new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd

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to inform subsequent methods. Still, it is the distinctive integration of research and applications that avoids the problems frequently observed in message development: inadequate research undergirding creative communications recommendations or, conversely, extensive opinion research with no demonstrable communications outcomes. In order to deliver a communications strategy that has potential to change the public debate if it is effectively deployed, the effects of frames on public understanding must be empirically validated. The institute’s researchers investigate different approaches, test rival hypotheses, eliminate those that do not yield strong policy preferences, and translate findings into tools and applications that experts and frontline advocates can use in their work toward social change of entrenched and complex social problems. Notes 1. Stone, D. (2008). The Samaritan’s dilemma: Should government help your neighbor? New York: Nation Books. P. 2. 2. Skocpol, T., & Fiorina, M. (Eds.). (1999). Civic engagement in American democracy. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press. 3. Mackenzie, G. C., & Labiner, J. M. (2002). Opportunity lost: The rise and fall of trust and confidence in government after September 11. Washington, DC: Center for Public Services, Brookings Institution. 4. Bostrom, M. (2005). By, or for, the people? A meta-analysis of public opinion on government. Washington, DC: FrameWorks Institute. Coleman, J. S., & Hoffer, T. (1987). Public and private high schools: The impact of communities. New York: Basic Books. 5. Putnam, R. (1995). Bowling alone: America’s declining social capital. Journal of Democracy, 6(1), 65–78. 6. See, for example, Putnam. (1995); Dryzek, J. (2002). Deliberative democracy and beyond: Liberals, critics, contestations. New York: Oxford University Press; Galston, W. A. (2004). Civic education and political participation. Political Science and Politics, 37(2), 263–266. 7. Flacks, R. (1988). Making history: The American left and the American mind. New York: Columbia University Press. 8. Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1999). Metaphors we live by. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. TIFFANY MANUEL is an expert in policy analysis and serves as research director at the FrameWorks Institute. LYNN DAVEY is a developmental psychologist and serves as vice president at the FrameWorks Institute in Washington, D.C.


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Findings from a cognitive content analysis of media frames on youth issues are presented to identify the implicit understandings about youth conveyed in the public discourse.

3 The family bubble, achievement gap, and development as competition: Media frames on youth Moira O’Neil the media are arguably the public’s dominant source of information about youth issues in contemporary American society and the primary site where these issues are transformed into social problems in need of solutions. Identifying persistent media frames through a cognitive media analysis is an important step in FrameWorks’ empirical measurement of public thinking about youth issues. It is also a critical point where researchers can begin to decipher how policy solutions will resonate with a broader public. Traditional quantitative methods in media content analysis have been developed in several academic fields, including communications, political science, and sociology. With increasingly sophisticated methods, scholars can quantify in ways previously unimaginable several aspects of the media, such as the amount of coverage a given topic receives; the categories of events, people, places, and issues that receive media attention; and the differences


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in coverage of issues by type of media, among many other projects. FrameWorks Institute envisions cognitive media analysis as an essential complement to these more quantitatively oriented projects. These cognitive analyses provide a qualitative examination of youth issues by examining such factors as the types of topics that are and are not mentioned in a given article, the ways in which topics within a story are treated as related or unrelated, the causal stories conveyed or implied by the articles, the metaphors employed, the explicit and implicit solutions proposed to a given problem, and so forth. The analysis is less about cataloguing what is explicitly said than it is about identifying the implicit understandings conveyed by the media materials. Employing this method, FrameWorks conducted a cognitive content analysis of major news articles that covered issues relating to race in health care, education, and early child development. Although the primary focus of the content analysis was the framing of racial disparities in the media, many of our findings are directly related to media framing of youth issues. Furthermore, these findings reflect consistent frames about youth that FrameWorks has identified through other research and analysis of advocacy materials.1 The analysis is based on a sample of over 140 news articles published between January 1, 2007, and December 31, 2007, and drawn from news sources in New York City, Washington, D.C., Boston, Atlanta, Chicago, Denver, San Francisco, and Seattle. The examples chosen for each section are prototypical expressions of the frames identified in the analysis. This chapter describes what FrameWorks found to be the three most dominant, or persistently evoked, frames in media coverage on youth issues and explains their likely impact on public thinking: • The family bubble frame—or the idea that parents are solely responsible for child outcomes • The understanding of disparities as achievement gaps • Youth development as a competitive race—or the idea that the overarching goal of educational and social development is to make youth more successful than their peers new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd

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This article provides an explanation of the construction and nuances of these frames, with examples drawn from the sampled news articles. Together these frames have the effect of promoting individualist understanding of social problems related to youth and limit imaginable solutions to policies that fix pathological individuals rather than broken systems. This is problematic for advocates and experts because the chronic availability of these frames in the public discourse will likely dampen public support for policies designed to address youth issues.

The family bubble frame The articles that address youth issues have a strong tendency to invoke the family bubble frame: a dominant assumption in the public’s ideas about parenting that child rearing occurs primarily, if not solely, within the family context, while environments and extrafamilial relationships are irrelevant.2 This frame is employed in a wide variety of social issues related to youth, including health, education, and development. Among the articles included in this analysis are those that addressed racial disparities in health care outcomes and access to health care, some of which emphasized the implications for young people of color. The news media not only documented the existence of racial disparities but also attempted to explain why such disparities persist. Invoking the family bubble frame, several articles implicitly and explicitly argued that youth of color suffered from poorer health than their white counterparts because of the ignorance of their parents, and specifically their mothers, of important health practices. For example, one article covered the tragic story of Deamonte Driver, a young boy who died of a tooth infection easily preventable through regular visits to the dentist. His mother, who was homeless, could not find a dentist who would accept her insurance. The author of the article explained that some barriers to dental care for children of color include lack of transportation, child care, and English fluency. A few paragraphs later, however, the journalist wrote: new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd

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On a recent Monday morning, the waiting room at Chevelry was about threequarters full. Danya Gordon, a case manager, said one of the center’s major issues is the lack of availability of the parents because of schedule conflicts. Nine-year-old Abdul Kamara of Chevelry was cavity-free in a dental checkup at the center early last week and returned a few days later to get a chip on the front tooth repaired. “You’ve been brushing very well,” dentist Debony Hughes told him. Memunatu Kamara, the boy’s mother, said the family learned about the clinic through another part of the health center. Hughes said the clinic’s biggest challenge is to educate parents on the importance of dental care for children. “There needs to be more outreach,” she said, “because if the parent does not know, then of course the child won’t know.”3

This passage clearly shows how readily the family bubble frame is invoked, even when the journalist highlights large issues that may impede the quality of young people’s health care. It begins with the assertion that children’s dental health suffers when parents are not available for dental appointments. However, the end of the passage reframes the problem so that parents’ knowledge of dental health becomes a bigger obstacle than their physical presence. Framing the problem as a lack of parental knowledge and confining the solution to the family obscures solutions that might address some underlying systemic problem—for example, parents who work cannot accompany their children to the dentist. The solution offered in the article is to increase outreach and public education to parents rather than, for example, extending office hours so that working parents could be available to attend their children’s appointments or instituting dental screenings in schools. The family bubble frame is not confined to health issues but pervades several issue domains related to youth. It is perhaps most pernicious when the media turn their attention to issues of child development. Rather than racial disparities, these articles addressed more explicitly the impacts of class background on child development, yet they still promote public thinking about child development that confines responsibility for children to the family unit, as the following passage demonstrates: The best predictor of how a child will do in school is not reading ability but rather the size and richness of the child’s vocabulary. And, as with so much in life, the kids whose parents worry about this area the most tend new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd

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to be the kids we need to worry about least. Veteran early-childhood researchers Betty Hart and Todd Risley conducted a meticulous longitudinal study tracking the vocabulary growth in young children coming from three types of families: professional class, working class, and those who were on welfare. The results were stunning, and depressing for anyone who is troubled by inequity. They found that the children were very much a product of what they were exposed to by their parents: between 86 and 98 percent of the words in their vocabularies were also words their parents used. Across four years, the average child from a professional family would have heard nearly 45 million words spoken to them, the average child from a working class family, 26 million, and the average child from a family on welfare, 13 million. That means that compared with the affluent child, the poor child would be starting school with an astonishing deficit of 32 million words of language experience. How can that child’s entire educational career not, on some level, become a demoralizing case of catch-up?4

While the message here is that children thrive in stimulating environments, those environments are defined exclusively as parent-child interactions. The article does not comment on the children’s exposure to other adults, such as extended family or other caregivers who interact with the children. Nor does it comment on the conditioning effect of other community influences on those parents’ ability to parent, such as the presence or absence of accessible public libraries or early literacy supports. That is, these articles (and perhaps the design of the studies they report) evince a strong tendency to invoke the family bubble, where children’s environments are limited to their immediate families.

The achievement gap frame Our analysis on racial disparities also showed that differences among youth in several key areas, such as education and health, were typically described metaphorically as gaps. The most frequently cited gap in these media was the “achievement gap,” or differences in educational outcomes among students of different races, and most often they focused on disparities between white and black students. Most of the articles in our analysis framed the achievement gap as new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd

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something that was assumed, a given, and provided little explanation as to the measures (such as standardized test scores or grade point average) used in the scholarly literature to document that such a gap in fact exists. Our analysis revealed a notable absence of a clear description of what is meant by “poor educational outcomes” for students of color. The following excerpt, for example, reported on new measures that used socioeconomic status instead of race as a way to integrate schools and ensure equal educational opportunity for all students: Experts of every political persuasion agree that the achievement gap—the disparity between white children and black children’s educational achievement— is the biggest problem in American education. And just about every recent educational innovation, whether vouchers, the No Child Left Behind Act or school financing law suits, was designed with an eye to closing that gap.5

The primary explanatory frames employed in this and similar stories explored why individual students were not “achieving” academic success at the same rate as their peers. Journalists typically used examples of individual students or their families to show readers why such disparities continue to exist. One article cited “unprepared households” as the primary cause of racial disparities in school performance. Previous FrameWorks research,6 as well as the scholarly work of Shanto Iyengar,7 has found that anecdotes about individuals in the media tend to obscure considerations of the larger systemic causes and solutions related to a specific issue. Another common reason cited for differences in the “achievement gap” between black and white students was “low expectations” for black students’ educational success. For example, the following excerpt described differences in educational outcomes, such as SAT scores, between white and black students in affluent, suburban areas: Stubborn disparities challenge educators everywhere, including those in affluent Washington suburbs, where overall high performance can overshadow lower achievement among some groups. The typical explanations that experts cite—including language barriers, poverty or uninvolved parents—often do not fully explain those gaps. Three years ago, a group of highly educated and professional African American parents in Ashburn new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd

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realized that their middle-school-age sons could slip into under-achieving as they encountered low academic expectations in or out of school.8

Implied in this formulation is that students and the people surrounding them, such as peers and teachers, need only to change how they think about black achievement, and such gaps will begin to narrow. Although low expectations can certainly contribute to students’ achievement, the reliance on this as the explanatory frame is an oversimplification of the more complex and systemic factors that drive educational success or failure. In other words, journalists’ inability to frame systematic racial inequality as something concrete and connected to social structures has the effect of obscuring systemic sources of racial inequality in education. In the absence of concrete information as to how “educational achievement” is measured, readers are left to create their own ideas about what it might entail. The word achievement connotes something that an individual attains through hard work and personal enterprise and frequently leads to individualist explanations of why there are disparities in child development or in educational outcomes between affluent white children and poor children and children of color. Continued focus on an “achievement gap” will likely continue individualist thinking about youth and educational inequality, even when not intended in that way. Experts and advocates who want to enter the public conversation on reducing racial disparities in education need to be especially cautious that the frames they employ do not trigger individualist thinking. This counterproductive frame will likely lead the public away from policy solutions.

The youth development as competitive race frame In the media reviewed, both child development and educational attainment were typically framed as competitive races with winners and losers. For example, the following excerpt from an article that appeared in the Boston Globe Magazine covered the developmental philosophy of the Better Baby Institute, located new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd

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outside Philadelphia. Profiling a family whose toddler followed the institute’s developmental regime, the journalist described the mother’s motivation for seeking out the institute: Anderson, with the support of her husband, has been working hard to give their daughter a leg up since Morgan was in her womb. While other moms-to-be were dog-earing their copies of What to Expect When You’re Expecting, Anderson spent her pregnancy searching for the best approaches to help boost her baby’s brainpower.9

“Boosting” an infant’s brainpower was framed primarily as a way to ensure a child’s later educational achievement. Early childhood development was talked about as a competitive race in which parents must do all they can to ensure that their children have a “leg up.” For example, providing the historical context for the increase in public demand for knowledge and consumable products related to children’s cognitive development, this author explained the origins of the race metaphor. But then, says David Elkind, a long-time child development professor at Tufts University, came Sputnik and the startling Soviet successes in space in the late 1950s that spurred Americans to ratchet up their educational demands on the ground. After that came Head Start, the 1960s federal program aimed at closing the achievement gap by better preparing poor children before they entered school. Elkind says the choice of names for the program was unfortunate because it made many middle-class parents believe that if there was some early-advancement special sauce that poor children were getting, they wanted it for their kids as well. “Parents began seeing it as a race,” he says.10 In another example that reported on scholarly research that showed that the popular Baby Einstein DVDs reduced rather than improved children’s verbal development, the author described parents’ attitudes toward their infants’ development as one of an “arms race”: Brody, who teaches a course on children and media at the University of Maryland, says videos have helped fuel a kind of arms race involving “hypercom-


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petitive parents who use their children as objects” and seek to ensure they are keeping up—or better yet, excelling.11

The competitive race metaphor persisted beyond articles that covered early child development. For example, this article reported the decline of enrollment of students of color to the University of California system after affirmative action was declared illegal in 1996. Students of color, the journalist notes, were losing in the “academic arms race.” But in the early 1990s, elite campuses began to pull back from their aggressive affirmative action policies, and in 1996, California voters passed the California Civil Rights Initiative, also known as Proposition 209. After that, race could no longer be a factor in government hiring or public university admissions. The number of black students at both Berkeley and the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) plummeted, and the declines continued through the next decade at UCLA. The reasons were not entirely clear, but they seemed to include some combination of the admissions office’s taking Proposition 209 to heart and black students falling further behind in the academic arms race.12 In these passages, youth development and education are understood primarily as a competition with very high stakes; “arms race” typically connotes a nation’s participation in a competition that will somehow lead to the security of its people. Framing young people’s development as a race has important policy implications. In these articles, education is not framed as a social good. In other words, the metaphor does not underscore the benefits that accrue to all members of a society when the populace has access to education. In a race or competition, it is understandable that certain groups—in this case, racial groups—will have to fall behind. The educational arms race also indicates that increasing educational opportunities for one group will mean that another will lose. Therefore, policies that are aimed at promoting racial equity—such as funding for preschools in low-income communities or affirmative action programs—will likely not resonate with people who fear that their children will become “losers.”


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Conclusion Although different in their construction, the three frames that researchers identified as prevalent in the news media surrounding youth issues share an important common feature. The resolutions of complex social problems related to youth (for example, inadequate health care for poor children and children of color, or racial disparities in educational outcomes) are often constructed as the responsibility of individuals, not systems and structures: homeless mothers do not understand dental hygiene, parents are not doing everything they can to give their child a leg up through early developmental experiences, and individual students simply “do not care” enough about their future or their education. The media’s rendering of solutions to these problems is focused on fixing youth and their caretakers rather than on policy solutions that may address the more systemic causes of problems that affect the population of young people. Pumping the swamp of public discourse through cognitive media analysis informs advocates and experts about the dimensions of the public conversation about youth and how the dominant frames in discourse may advantage certain considerations about the causes and solutions to social problems over others. In the case of youth issues, communicators need to steer clear of triggering the dominant frames identified here, which define problems and solutions narrowly and tend to obscure the public dimensions of and opportunities in healthy youth development. Notes 1. These areas were selected to provide geographical diversity in the sample. New stories were drawn from the New York Times, Washington Post, Washington Times, Boston Globe, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Chicago Sun-Times, Denver Post, San Francisco Chronicle, and Seattle Times, among others. 2. See Aubrun, A., & Grady, J. (2003). Two cognitive obstacles to preventing child abuse: The “other mind” mistake and the “family bubble.” Washington, DC: FrameWorks Institute; FrameWorks Institute. (2005). Talking early child development and exploring the consequences of frame choices: A FrameWorks message memo. Washington, DC: FrameWorks Institute. 3. Payne, J. (2007, March 27). Dental care challenge: Open wider; local tragedy spotlights for more affordable care and public education. Washington Post, Health Section, p. HE01. new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd

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4. Swidey, N. (2007, October 28). Rush, little baby—How the push for infant academics may actually be a waste of time—or worse. Boston Globe Magazine, p. 22. 5. Tamar, L., & Herszenhorn, D. M. (2007, June 30). Money, not race, is fueling new push to bolster schools. New York Times, p. A10. 6. For a more detailed discussion on the use of anecdotes, see Gilliam, F. (2006). Vivid examples: What they mean and why you should be careful using them. http://www.frameworksinstitute.org/ezine33.html. 7. Iyengar. S. (1991). Is anyone responsible? How television frames political issues. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 8. Chandler, M. A. (2007, November 6). Lingering academic gap riles NAACP; Loudoun board told more efforts, resources needed. Washington Post, Metro Section, p. B01. 9. Swidey. (2007). 10. Swidey. (2007). 11. Goodman, S. (2007, October 9). Wishful thinking: Many parents believe that watching videos and DVDs may help bring out the budding genius in their babies. Washington Post, Health Section, p. HE01. 12. Leonhardt, D. (2007, September 30). The new affirmative action. New York Times Magazine, p. 76.

moira o’neil is a sociologist and serves as senior researcher at the FrameWorks Institute.


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Studying the cultural models that individuals use in thinking about a specific issue is the foundation of a cognitive approach to communications research.

4 Mapping cultural models and translating expert explanations of child development with simplifying models Nathaniel Kendall-Taylor why do so many important policy messages have such limited impact on public thinking? How can communications science improve the impact and effect of this information? Research that FrameWorks has carried out sheds light on the first question by studying cultural models—the perceptual structures that shape how people process information to understand their social worlds. When existing patterns of understanding are drawn on, these messages can be recast, or reframed, to improve the accessibility and uptake of information. This article reviews the FrameWorks approach to identifying the cultural models individuals employ in making sense of information about children and youth issues. It also discusses the role of these cultural patterns of understanding in developing communications that give people access to a fuller array of information that can then be used in thinking about public policies and social issues.


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Culture and mental models FrameWorks’ approach to communications research is grounded solidly in the science of how humans think about and make sense of the worlds they live in. Extensive research in anthropology has shown that generalized structures of meaning exist in the mind and are applied to make sense of the infinitely wide range of experiences and information that individuals encounter.1 Put another way, humans have stable configurations of relationships, or models, that are applied to understand and make meaning from information. This feature of cognition allows individuals to make sense of an infinite range of novel information and permutations using a relatively small set of commonsense categorizations, hypotheses, and assumptions about how the world works. In this way, cognition is a decidedly top-down process. The top-down characteristic of cognition is the key to communications research that investigates how people interpret and evaluate social problems and information about social issues. Because the patterns in how people make sense of information are used predictably in response to specific bits of information and shared across individuals, research documenting these patterns illuminates how individuals interpret specific pieces of information. Furthermore, because exposure to the media is incessant and its content thin, people have a lot of practice “thinking” the limited set of mental models that these messages trigger. The most frequently activated subset of all the possible models that people have available becomes highly practiced, familiar, and easy to think. An example from past FrameWorks research demonstrates the relationship between frames in the public discourse and the models people use to reason about social issues. As O’Neil explains in this article in this volume, one of the most consistent media frames on issues related to children and youth is that of the family bubble, or the idea that solely parents are responsible for their children’s development. It is not surprising, then, that FrameWorks’ research has shown that Americans interpret information about child development


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through a narrow, persistent, and highly shared assumption that parents are all that matters.2 Furthermore, FrameWorks’ research has shown that even when the actual content of the message is about nonparental factors that influence development, the assumption that parents are all that matters is likely to be applied in deriving meaning and making sense of information. The effect of a message is therefore heavily influenced by the set of mental assumptions it cues, which work independent of, and in the case of the example, even against, actual content.3 However, by activating different patterns of thinking, communications can shift interpretations of information. In the cognitive sciences, these generalized and shared assumptions and patterns of thinking are called cultural models. In the following passage, Naomi Quinn, a cognitive anthropologist and cultural models researcher, captures the key features of cultural models: Culture in this sense of understandings encompasses the largely tacit, taken-for-granted, and hence invisible assumptions that people share with others of their group and carry around inside them, and draw upon in forming expectations, reasoning, telling stories, and performing a plethora of other ordinary everyday cognitive tasks.4

Researchers in the cognitive fields of anthropology and applied linguistics have found cultural models to be tacit and implicit, or, as Quinn writes, “referentially transparent.”5 Members of a cultural group do not refer to or use cultural models consciously or call on them explicitly. Instead, they employ these sets of assumptions and understandings without the awareness of their application or role in organizing thinking and reasoning. Quinn’s definition also stresses the shared nature of cultural models. Membership in a cultural group is both defined and facilitated by the use of these shared structures, such that what is taken for granted is taken for granted by all those sharing the model. These shared tacit assumptions facilitate interaction and understanding among members of a cultural group. Quinn’s definition of cultural models highlights the fact that cultural models are held cognitively in the minds of individuals who


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share a common set of experiences. She also notes that cultural models are activated when individuals are engaged in cognitive tasks, like narrating an event, explaining something, or reasoning.

From understanding models to strategic framing One aspect of Strategic Frame Analysis is identifying the gaps that exist between expert and public understandings of social problems. As part of the larger frame analysis process, FrameWorks has developed a specific research strategy to design and test simplifying models—one element in reframing communications. FrameWorks defines a simplifying model as a research-driven, empirically tested, mechanistic metaphor that captures an expert concept by way of an explanatory framework consonant with existing lay cultural models. A simplifying model “reduces a complex problem to a simple, concrete analogy or metaphor [and] contributes to understanding by helping people organize information into a clear picture in their heads, including facts and ideas previously learned but not organized in a coherent way.”6 FrameWorks uses simplifying models to bridge cognitive gaps between experts and the general public, and in so doing brings expert knowledge and understandings in line with the public’s existing cultural models for understanding a phenomenon. The simplifying models that result from this research are then tested as part of the larger frame, which includes other elements, such as values, messengers, and tone, to determine their effectiveness in dislodging the entrenched and unproductive patterns of thinking that are used to understand social issues. The first stage of simplifying models research employs cultural models interviews to document the models that individuals employ in making sense of an issue. Consistent with the interview methods employed in psychological anthropology, cultural models interviews are designed to elicit ways of thinking and talking that reveal the shared cultural models that broadly organize thinking on a topic. Cultural models interviewing and analysis requires gathering a sufnew directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd

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ficient sample of talk from a group of informants to reveal broad patterns of thinking, or what Quinn calls a “big scoop of language.”7 Analysis of the data from these interviews identifies discourses, or common, patterned, standardized ways of talking.8 These discourses are then analyzed to reveal common and tacit organizational assumptions, relationships, logical steps, and connections. In FrameWorks’ research on early child development, cultural models interviews revealed a set of cultural models that Americans apply in thinking about and making sense of information on child development and early education. Common, implicit assumptions, like “parents are all that matters,” “development just unfolds naturally,” and “children are resilient,” are integral in understanding how Americans filter and process information about children and youth. These implicit assumptions lead to patterns in the interpretation of messages that mask the importance of developmental contexts and the public’s role and responsibility in child development. In the second step in the simplifying models research process, FrameWorks compares these cultural models to expert knowledge and explanations of the issue. This comparison invariably reveals a series of gaps that lie between the assumptions these two groups make and how they approach and understand information. We call the gaps between expert explanations and public understandings lay-expert gaps. Identifying these gaps is essential because simplifying models are specifically designed to recast expert explanations in ways that are understandable to the public and offer a new way of considering the issue. Closing the gap between expert and public understandings and assumptions is particularly important because most attempts to communicate expert materials proceed as if the public shares experts’ basic underlying understanding of how a problem works. Instead, conspicuous mismatches tend to exist between how experts assume the public approaches an issue and the public’s actual understanding of a given phenomenon.9 Therefore, unframed expert information frequently does not fit into the cultural models that the public employs to think about an issue, and because of problems of interpretation, the information has little of its intended effect. The purpose of a simplifying model is to fill the gap between new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd

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the expert explanation and the public understanding and, in so doing, improve the cognitive accessibility of a message. The issue of preschool is a good example of a gap between expert and lay considerations of an issue. For child development and education experts, preschool is an integral site of learning where young children have important experiences and interactions through which they develop foundational skills that they will call on and use later in school and in life more generally. The public, in contrast, holds cultural models in which preschool is assumed to be “a place to put kids” so that adults can go to work—a site where little “real learning” takes place. This gap makes expert information on executive function and the importance of early learning environments decidedly hard to think. Another example of a conspicuous layexpert gap exists in conceptions of environments of developmental significance. FrameWorks’ research on early child development has shown that experts have a nuanced, broad, and systemic understanding of the contexts and environments that are significant in a child’s development. Experts focus on the entirety of the experiences and interactions that children have, including early care and education and social systems that provide services to communities. The public’s understanding of environments is decidedly narrower, focusing on parents and the home as the sole contexts that shape developmental outcomes. This means that communications about the importance of social policies and programs for children and youth are filtered through the assumption that parents and the home are all that matter. Public policies therefore are difficult to think about and see as solutions to developmental problems. As described earlier, after identifying the lay-expert gaps on a given issue, FrameWorks generates a set of candidate simplifying models that can be empirically explored and tested. Transcripts from expert interviews and cultural models interviews are analyzed to produce a list of metaphor categories that represent common ground, or overlap between expert and general public data. A particular focus is placed on generating metaphors that capture the process element of the expert understanding in metaphorical concepts that are familiar and easily visualized.10 FrameWorks new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd

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researchers then conduct a cognitive analysis of the simplifying models that examines the expected public responses to and interpretation of the metaphors. Each simplifying model is then subjected to empirical testing, using a multiple-method approach comprising on-the-street interviews, focus groups, and quantitative experiments with a nationally representative sample. In on-the-street interviews, FrameWorks answers the following questions in relation to each candidate simplifying model: • Do informants understand the model and its underlying metaphor? • Do informants employ the model in discussing the larger issue to which the expert concept is related? • Does the model shift discussions away from the unproductive dominant models that characterize initial responses? • Does exposure to the model facilitate more articulate answers and fully developed conversations in areas where answers were underdeveloped prior to exposure to the model? These interviews thus provide an opportunity to winnow and refine the simplifying models. Using these data, FrameWorks eliminates the simplifying models that are clearly not working—that are not understandable, do not facilitate an improved understanding, and are not viral in seeping into informant discourse. These data are also instrumental to the process of refining the models toward more positive results. Following analysis, the remaining and newly refined models are tested quantitatively. In the quantitative experiment, a panel of lay participants is exposed to one of the candidate simplifying models and guided through a series of exercises designed to assess the model’s effectiveness. More specifically, these experiments provide data on how understandable the model is, its applicability in solving problems related to the social problem, its effectiveness in shifting away from solely personal attributions of responsibility, and its effect on the perceived salience of social problems.11 Using the data from these experiments, FrameWorks again winnows the set of promising candidate simplifying models. new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd

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The simplifying models are then tested in a series of peer discourse sessions designed to gather more qualitative data on the remaining candidate simplifying models. In these sessions, FrameWorks focuses on determining how viral, or communicable, the model is—how it moves around the room among participants engaged in a group discussion—and how its language seeps into participants’ conversations. In a final round of testing, FrameWorks brings two or three of the most successful models into final quantitative testing to determine the model that is most successful in shifting the attribution of responsibility from private to public and in helping participants solve policy problems in the issue area. This final round of testing also measures the durability of the model over time: research participants are followed up approximately two weeks after their initial exposure to determine the persistence of the effects of the model over time.

Conclusion Uncovering the cultural models individuals employ to make sense of information is a necessary precursor to improving the impact of strategic communications. Mapping patterns of understanding provides guidance to experts and advocates about what framing strategies are likely to trigger unproductive patterns of thinking that make messages and information harder to think. Armed with an appreciation of how people cognitively approach information, communications can strategically cue more promising models that, while cognitively available, are more latent in the mind. Furthermore, an appreciation of existing cultural models reveals the cognitive gaps between experts and the lay public on a given issue and enables the empirical design and testing of simplifying models that improve the application and use of previously inaccessible information in understanding issues and seeing policy solutions to social problems. Notes 1. Holland, D., & Quinn, N. (1987). Cultural models in language and thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd

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2. FrameWorks Institute. (2005). Talking early child development and exploring the consequences of frame choices. Washington, DC: FrameWorks Institute. 3. Iyengar, S. (1991). Is anyone responsible? How television frames political issues. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 4. Quinn, N. (2005). Finding culture in talk: A collection of methods. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. P. 3. 5. Quinn. (2005). 6. FrameWorks Institute. (2009). The FrameWorks approach. Washington, DC: FrameWorks Institute. P. 3. 7. Quinn. (2005). P. 16. 8. Strauss, C. (2009). A social discourse theory of public opinion: How Americans talk about immigration and social welfare. Manuscript submitted for publication. Strauss, C. (2005). Analyzing discourse for cultural complexity. In N. Quinn (Ed.), Finding culture in talk: A collection of methods. New York: Palgrave. 9. Kempton, W. (1987). Two theories of home heat control. In D. Holland & N. Quinn (Eds.), Cultural models in language and thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Linde, C. (1987). Explanatory systems in oral life stories. In D. Holland & N. Quinn (Eds.), Cultural models in language and thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; White, G. (1987). Proverbs and cultural models: An American psychology of problem solving. In D. Holland & N. Quinn (Eds.), Cultural models in language and thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 10. Kempton. (1987). P. 236. 11. One reason that Americans have trouble supporting public policies is that they attribute responsibility, even for social problems such as the failing education system, to individuals. Therefore, a task in improving the ability to think about public solutions to social problems entails a shift in the sense of responsibility for these problems from individual to a more public or social attribution of responsibility.

nathaniel kendall-taylor is an anthropologist and serves as senior researcher at the FrameWorks Institute.


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Peer discourse sessions, a new approach to conducting and analyzing focus groups, allow researchers to confirm the cultural models employed to reason about social problems, as well as to explore the social expression and negotiation of those models.

5 From focus groups to peer discourse sessions: The evolution of a method to capture language, meaning, and negotiation Tiffany Manuel, Nathaniel Kendall-Taylor “thank you for listening.” We have heard these words many times at the end of focus groups over the past twenty years. People tell us that they appreciate being listened to. Interestingly, we do not hear those comments when we conduct individual interviews, telephone interviews, or survey research. Something about a focus group is different and causes people to feel that they are being heard.1 Focus groups have long been an integral part of market research efforts. Typically consisting of eight- to twelve-person discussions moderated by a facilitator who guides participants through a series of prompts on a given topic, focus groups are used as bellwethers of public opinion.2 As intensive listening sessions with the public, focus groups have come to be seen as a tool for gathering information too difficult or costly to capture using other methods. However,


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focus groups are more than a cheap or direct proxy for other qualitative methods. FrameWorks approaches this method by recognizing that it has the power to answer a unique set of questions—questions that other methods such as individual interviews and surveys are ill suited to explore. Focus groups offer a different set of data that, through careful and appropriate analysis, provide a unique methodological lens through which to explore communication and understanding about important social issues. Although focus groups are perceived as useful conduits for collecting data, until the past decade or so, these so-called listening sessions had been relatively maligned as a methodology within social science research. That is, scholarship based on data from focus groups as the primary method of intellectual discovery, data collection, and analysis had rarely been accepted in highly ranked social science journals. This was true for a variety of reasons, the most important of which seemed to be the perception that the interpretation of the data that emanated from these groups was more subjective and less rigorous than other forms of data collection and analysis.3 In more recent years and for a variety of reasons, focus groups have become more commonly used by social science researchers (particularly by researchers in the field of political communications), and their reception among social science journals has improved dramatically. This is reflected by the increasing number of books written on focus groups as a method and the increasing number of published research articles in the political communications field that rely on this method for primary data.4 Lunt and Livingstone see this as part of a larger movement in the social sciences toward the use of qualitative research.5 For researchers in the field of political communications, the benefits of using focus groups are fairly straightforward. They can be useful, cost-saving devices for quickly gauging the public’s perception of social issues; they can capture the group effect or the effect of social interaction on public perception of social issues; they enable the capture of vernacular speech used in addressing or talking about issues; and they have inherent and immediate face validnew directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd

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ity (that is, the method makes sense as a way to see what people think and how they talk about social issues). Although we certainly concur about these benefits of focus groups, we see the most pertinent and useful advantage of this research method to our work in the growing recognition among political communication researchers that “there is a good fit between this approach [focus groups] and many questions in our subfield surrounding language and meaning.”6 That is, focus groups offer enormous possibilities in terms of understanding how the public makes sense of social issues, determines meaning from common ways of communicating about an issue, how shared meanings develop, and how these common understandings bear on the support for public policy. These relatively new acknowledgments of the power of focus groups explain in part the increasing appearance of this method among those more commonly used in political communications research. Although the legitimacy of focus groups has come a long way in the field of political communications, their usefulness as a research method in our practice at FrameWorks has evolved considerably beyond what stands as typical practice in communications research. To distinguish our use of the method from that in other disciplines, FrameWorks refers to its specific orientation and application of the focus group method as peer discourse sessions. In this article, we discuss our conceptual treatment of peer discourse sessions as a method of inquiry and our rationale for distinguishing these sessions from approaches to focus groups used in other fields. We also explain and give examples of the types of information we extract from them and the questions that these data allow us to answer.

Cultural models and their traveling power in peer discourse sessions Peer discourse analysis relies on two theoretical concepts in cognitive anthropology and linguistics. The first is cultural models (see the article by Kendall-Taylor in this volume): the generalized and shared hypotheses, relationships, and assumptions that members of new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd

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a culture use to derive meaning from their social worlds. The second is social discourses: the patterns in how people talk—for example, the jargon and rhetoric—that are shaped by and reveal the presence of underlying cultural models. While cultural models reside in the heads of individuals, these cognitive structures both originate and are used socially.7 So knowing the outlines, contours, and substance of cultural models is only the beginning. We must also understand how people make use of these mental models—that is, we need to know when these mental models are deployed and how they are negotiated in making sense of the world. Deployment and negotiation are most visible in social situations where individuals are implicitly applying the models in communicating, making arguments, and responding to those of others. Peer discourse analysis can allow researchers to capture and examine this social negotiation of models and so move from descriptive analysis squarely into the prescriptive phase of Strategic Frame Analysis.

The evolution of a method to capture language, meaning, and negotiation Peer discourse sessions are directed conversations moderated by a trained facilitator who follows a structured guide. These sessions therefore may appear to resemble more traditional focus groups— one-time moderated discussions of social issues—but our approach differs in terms of methodology and practical use from marketingoriented focus groups and those typically conducted for communications research. First, although peer discourse sessions follow a structured interview guide, the primary responsibility of the facilitator is to get the participants talking to one another while remaining a neutral and relatively invisible observer of the discussions that ensue. Moreover, our objective in bringing such groups together is not to focus on opinions or how participants “feel” about the particular social issue, but rather to gather data and concentrate on the types and characteristics of peer discourses and negotiations that organically new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd

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develop in discussions around the issue. Put another way, we want to identify the types and patterns of discourse that arise in the course of discussion rather than the content of specific opinions that participants offer. To underscore and draw attention to this point, we refer to these groups in our practice as peer discourse sessions rather than focus groups. The focus on patterns of discourse also has implications for how we analyze the data emerging from these groups and emphasizes a second characteristic that distinguishes peer discourse sessions from more traditional focus groups. Analysis of the data centers on analyzing what participants explicitly say (where analysis of data from more traditional focus groups typically ends), the logic that undergirds the viewpoints and opinions expressed, and the discourses, or patterns of talk, that structure the expression of these views. So, for example, our analyses of a particular set of peer discourse sessions might give emphasis to dynamics such as these: • How lucid and developed are people’s viewpoints and opinions about the issue (or how easily and willingly do participants get into and sustain the conversation without probing or prompting from the facilitator)? • How strong are the dominant cultural models that become active when engaging in the issue (or how quickly do these cultural patterns of meaning making appear, and how easily do people latch onto their expressions)? • What are the cognitive challenges that materialize in the discussion (are there places where people consistently have difficulty conceptualizing or explaining key ideas related to the issue)? Although these represent only a few of a much longer list of investigative guides and questions we use to analyze data from the peer discourse sessions, these examples underscore that our analytical lens is not typical of communications research more generally. Third, unlike the focus groups that are more typical of communications research, we use peer discourse sessions in an iterative and new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd

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exploratory way. They are iterative in the sense that we allow the format of these sessions to evolve across multiple groups as we observe the emergence of promising patterns of discourse. Moreover, our approach is exploratory in that we introduce “primes”—elements intended to redirect or create different types of discussions in groups—and explore the ways in which participants receive and use these efforts to redirect or shift discourse. More specifically, we are interested in whether (and to what extent) those primes illuminate systems-level thinking within the groups. As a result, out of the typical six to ten peer discourse sessions we conduct on an issue, the first group may look very different from the tenth. We therefore tend to think of the guide used to conduct these groups as an evolving instrument that is open to exploration following analysis of each session. Fourth, peer discourse sessions and the analyses conducted with the data that emerge from them are not meant to provide message directives about how to communicate about social issues. Instead, peer discourse sessions and analyses are always embedded within a much broader set of research methods that depend on each other, build on the findings from previous methods used, and offer findings that inform subsequent methods. In this way, peer discourse analyses are not stand-alone research efforts but part of a larger effort to triangulate, confirm, and generate data for subsequent exploration. Perhaps the most important distinction between peer discourse analysis and other approaches to focus groups is that we use peer discourse sessions as a way to see cultural models in action. These sessions provide an opportunity to see how cultural models function in practice—in a group setting that more closely approximates the social contexts in which discussions about social issues naturally occur. In using this method, we gather data on how individuals work with and publicly negotiate their existing default cultural models in reasoning and debating issues. Seeing the cultural models in action is important because only at this point can we experiment with primes that represent potential reframes and to see if, by intentionally cuing conversations with specific frame elements such as values and simplifying models, we can encourage a different type of conversation around a policy issue.8 new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd

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Peer discourse sessions in action The format of peer discourse sessions typically mirrors the three research objectives that form the basis for what we expect these sessions to deliver. In general, we structure the peer discourse sessions to: • Confirm the dominant models that emerge from the previous cultural models interviews and explore whether the group setting produces any variation in the findings derived from one-on-one interviews • Experiment with speculative reframes that emerge from the earlier interviews, prior research, or issue advocates and experts • Engage people in a negotiation in which they experience efficacy and agency over a complex problem and have to debate and articulate a position as a group To briefly illustrate this format, we point to a recent peer discourse analysis that FrameWorks conducted on how to reframe budget and tax issues and policies. The first exercise used a word association task to confirm the dominant frames attached to these issues and determine if the order in which the topics (budgets and taxes) were presented affected subsequent discussions. Did starting with the idea of “budgets” and moving to “taxes” have a different effect on conversations from starting with “taxes” and then moving to “budgets”? In the second part of the session, the facilitator introduced a value and a number of draft simplifying models as potential ways to unite budget and taxes and to see if, through the use of these frame elements, the groups could overcome the default to more dominant patterns of thinking. The final part of the session was a simplified budget and tax simulation in which small groups were tasked with constructing a federal budget by deciding among a set of program categories and articulating how they would fund their proposed budget. In this exercise, researchers were interested in determining whether the exercise provided a sense of agency9 and whether this agency helped the groups overcome concerns with lack of transparency new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd

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and complexity that were dominant features in unprimed conversations and that disengaged participants from productive conversations about budgets and taxes.10 In conducting these, we were able to ascertain the relative importance of order in communications around budgets and taxes (never “taxes” and “budgets”), the efficacy of blending the concepts of budgets and taxes together (because the public cognitively imagines these as unrelated entities), and establishing the frame elements that may generate a more productive conversation about budgets and taxes. Although these results are not exhaustive of our findings, they are invaluable in terms of the prescriptive guidance they offer to the subsequent phases of the research process: those that seek to identify the frame elements that will improve public support and issue understanding.

Conclusion The goal for advocates in any social issue is to communicate in ways that create new conversations and avoid the dead-end directions and pitfalls that characterize the way the public currently thinks about and understands an issue. Peer discourse analysis has emerged as an effective method to triangulate and confirm what we know about how people think and is a chance to experiment with ways that shift people into more productive patterns of thinking and talking about social responsibility and policy solutions. Our research using peer discourse sessions has revealed that shifting away from dominant and damaging patterns that exist around issues is possible and, furthermore, that communications must create a different sense of agency, making it easier for people to understand the effects that ordinary citizens can have in influencing leaders and structures to propose realistic, effective, empowering, and comprehensive reforms. Peer discourse sessions provide information on how communications can accomplish these shifts—ways that can be empirically tested in subsequent experimental quantitative surveys. new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd

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Notes 1. Krueger, R. A., & Casey, M. A. (2008). Focus groups: A practical guide for applied research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. P. xiii. 2. Morgan, whose work is widely considered one of the standards in defining basic focus group methods, defines focus groups as “a research technique that collects data through group interaction on a topic determined by the researcher. In essence, it is the researcher’s interest that provides the focus, whereas the data themselves come from the group interaction” (p. 6). Morgan, D. (1997). Focus groups as qualitative research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. 3. Other criticisms leveled at focus groups as a method of social inquiry are varied. First, criticisms have been made about the difficulty of facilitating these groups and how the facilitation can be a corrupting factor in terms of the direction of the perceptions extracted as data. Some question the validity of the data analysis because it is not always clear what to make of the conversation or other discourses that emerge during the group. The concern is that perceptions from the groups can be easily steered in some direction or cherrypicked to support a forgone conclusion. Still others question the external validity of such groups (for example, is the number of participants in a focus group large enough to be a representative sample of a population?). 4. Jarvis, S. E., & Barberena, L. (2008). Focus group methodology: A good fit for political communication research. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the NCA 94th Annual Convention, San Diego, CA. 5. Lunt, P., & Livingstone, S. (1996). Rethinking the focus group in media and communications research. Journal of Communication, 46(2), 79–98. 6. Jarvis & Barberena. (2008). 7. Quinn, N. (2005). Finding culture in talk: A collection of methods. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 8. Although we note that a few scholars who work with media effects and framing have used focus groups to illuminate the socially negotiated uses of frames. See, for example, Gamson, W. A. (1992). Talking politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 9. Few social scientists incorporate experiential exercises of this nature in the context of focus groups. Fern provides several examples of how experiential exercises are (or can be) usefully employed in focus groups. Fern, E. (2001). Advanced focus group research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. 10. To read the full paper and to see the kinds of experimental primes used in the analysis, see Kendall-Taylor, N., & O’Neil, M. (2009). Having our say: Getting priority, transparency and agency into the public discourse on budgets and taxes. Washington, DC: FrameWorks Institute.

tiffany manuel is an expert in policy analysis and serves as research director at the FrameWorks Institute. nathaniel kendall-taylor is an anthropologist and serves as senior researcher at the FrameWorks Institute. new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd

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The author describes the experimental research on frame effects that help advocates and policy experts choose strategically among competing narratives.

6 Who says your frames are better than mine? Making the case for strategic framing by using the power of experimental research Tiffany Manuel since the beginning of our work in 1999, we have been responding to an important set of questions from policy advocates: Does strategic framing really advance support for public policy, and if so, how do I know your frames are better mine? The articulation of these questions has come in a wide variety of formats and from advocates in all parts of the country, but the underlying concern put forth in these questions is as basic as they come: What is the empirical basis on which your communications recommendations rest? For many years, these questions were answered by pointing to the substantial (and still growing) scholarship at the nexus of human cognition, political communications, and cultural anthropology. That scholarship, using myriad research methodologies and written from the vantage point of several academic disciplines, provides clear and consistent evidence that there are enormous implications


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in understanding how social issues are cast and how they are subsequently received by the public. Although this body of research is rigorous, multidisciplinary, and methodologically varied, not all policy experts and advocates have been convinced that changing their established patterns of explaining social issues to the public and inviting the public’s engagement and support could be advanced by simply attending to the way they presented this information. To extend the reach of the existing literature, FrameWorks began to conduct its own research and developed Strategic Frame Analysis (SFA) to demonstrate the power of strategic framing on public support for policies, address the challenges experts and advocates had in making the transitions necessary to harness the benefits of the research we conducted, and demonstrate through as wide an empirical lens as possible that public support for policies can be advanced by attending to the presentation of information. As part of this approach, we began using experimental surveys to provide stronger evidence that some types of frames have a greater ability to move and affect policy support than others. In this way, we developed this method to show the magnitude by which brief exposures to alternative ways of thinking about social issues could alter the public’s policy preferences. Most important, as we discuss at greater length in this article, the use of experimental research allowed us to directly compare existing ways of talking about social issues in the public domain alongside alternative frames that prior stages of our research suggested held more promise in terms of lifting policy support. This kind of evidencebased approach to communications has become the hallmark of the FrameWorks Institute and is key to our success in providing definitive evidence that strategic framing makes a difference in determining the outcomes that matter most to policy advocates: public support. This article details our approach to conducting quantitative experiments to capture frame effects as well as to provide a discrete example of this kind of research and discuss the implications of our findings. new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd

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How social experiments are used to illuminate frame effects The overall objective of the experimental research on frame effects is to provide empirical evidence that informs communications recommendations to advocates and policy experts in ways that help them choose productively among competing narratives. In most cases, the experimental research is used to expand on prior qualitiative work on the issue by testing frames that may have performed well in one or more iterations of qualitiative work (cultural models interviews, peer discourse analysis) alongside those typically used in the media and by advocates in the field. The point of the latter is to directly compare whether frames already in the public domain serve to engage public support more than those that have emerged from the qualitative aspects of the research process. Broadly construed, the experimental research question asks whether exposing civically engaged persons to alternative ways of thinking about social issues has a measurable impact on a broad set of outcomes, including the salience of and support for public policies. This research question closely resembles those that undergird social experiments typical in the social sciences. More generally, experimental surveys are designed to estimate the net effects of one set of stimuli over other stimuli or over a control group or both. The logic of experiments more generally is fairly straightforward. The defining characteristics of an experiment are random assignment of a pool of individuals to one or more treatment groups and a control group, with a stimulus given to individuals in the treatments while withholding such treatment from individuals in the control condition and subsequently examining the performance of all groups (both treatments and control) on some outcome measure.1 The experiments we use to examine frame effects closely mirror this textbook explanation. The basic structure of our experimental work is summarized in Figure 6.1. We use a nationally representative sample of registered voters constructed using a random digit dial (RDD) sampling frame weighted


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Figure 6.1. Experimental design schematic

on the basis of gender, age, race, education, and party identification.2 Individuals in the sample are then randomly assigned to one of several treatment stimuli (sometimes as many as thirty treatments in a study each with 250 respondents) or to a control group (which usually represents about 450 respondents). All survey respondents are first asked to answer introductory questions, where they rate their level of concern about a short series of unrelated political issues and their consumption of different types of media. To avoid contamination of testing effects, the series of political issues offered to respondents is rotated each time the survey is administered and is quite broad in subject matter. Immediately following these questions, respondents are asked to read their assigned treatment, while the control group is given no stimulus but is moved to the next exercise. After exposure to the treatment (which represents a discrete conceptualization of the social issue at hand) or, in the case of the control group, no exposure to treatment, all respondents are asked to answer questions related to their support for related policies, their policy priorities, their attitude about the role of government, and their perceptions about how social problems should be resolved. Questions within each of these outcome areas are also rotated to mitigate testing, ordering, or another form of contamination in the tests. The list of related policies is collected and categorized into discrete policy index variables that we refer to as policy batteries, and they become the basis of our outcome measurements. new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd

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The policies chosen as outcome measures are typically selected from policy proposals advocated by issue experts on the issue and in accordance with the policy direction of our clients. We collect and categorize these policies into discrete policy groupings called batteries. A recent set of policy batteries on an experiment testing frame effects in communicating about children’s development included child and family mental health, child abuse and maltreatment, poverty and work, health, early care, and education. Typical policy questions for child mental health are, for example: • Should mental health and substance abuse services be expanded? • Should victims of child abuse receive priority in the allocation of mental health funds? • Should culturally or linguistically appropriate screening for early detection of mental health concerns be made available for children? Once the survey is conducted, the batteries are tested to ensure their reliability as independent scales, and, for ease of interpretation, these index variables are rescaled to range from 0 to 1. Once the surveys have been conducted, a statistical estimation model is developed that evaluates any differences between the treatments and the control group. These models test the experimental hypothesis that support for policies in the batteries will be higher for frames that have been favorably received in our qualitative work compared to the control group and to treatments that represent existing frames commonly found in the public domain. In addition, to increase the precision of the measurements, a limited number of covariates are incorporated into the estimation models, such as race, income, and education. In most cases, we start with a generalized linear regression model to examine basic frame effects and, depending on the specifics of the experiment, will incorporate other statistical estimation techniques.3 Once sufficient data about the relative value of the frames in terms of their effects on policy support have been extracted from the data, two written products are developed: a descriptive report that details the data analysis and findings, including any deviations in frame effects across demographic and political categories such new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd

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as race, gender, and class; and a memo to experts and advocates in the field that specifically uses the research—both the qualitative and experimental quantitative work—to provide specific communications recommendations.

Reasons to use experimental research to illuminate frame effects This experimental research is part of a much larger research trajectory that integrally includes a wide variety of qualitative research. In fact, it is the qualitative work that provides the candidate reframes that are included in the quantitative experiments. Moreover, experimental designs offer the power of answering a unique and important set of questions posed by advocates. First, experiments provide the ability to directly compare existing ways of talking about social issues by advocates, those found in the media, and other alternatives. This essentially means that recommendations can be tailored and targeted to the particular nuances of issue experts in the field that we are studying. In this way, the experiment can simultaneously demonstrate the power of effective and strategic framing as well as test the impact of frames already in use in the public domain. Another benefit of the experimental research method in evaluating frame effects is that it estimates the magnitude of the frame effects. So, for example, we can estimate how large the differences are in terms of policy support between reframes and existing patterns of communications about the issue. The ability to quantify differences in how people react to various frames is often an important and persuasive point for policy experts and advocates. Experiments also have the benefits of providing the opportunity to analyze the impact of the frames across different demographic groups, such as race/ethnic groups, gender, and class. Although the goal is to develop frames that are common enough that they appeal most broadly to the public, we routinely evaluate the proposition that groups may have differential reactions to frames. Other new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd

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research methods are ill suited for this purpose and do not offer the precision, sample size, or scope necessary to bear out this part of the research inquiry. Finally, the experimental research provides a greater ability to push the boundaries on the current frontier of communication science. Few communications firms do experimental work that would rigorously test the recommendations they present to advocates. By incorporating experimental research, we are able to tap into the causal value of experiments and the analytical power of large-scale national surveys experiments to see the impact of frames in action. Using experimental surveys does present challenges, especially experiments conducted using Web-based instruments. The two most important seem to be the execution of the frames and concerns about the digital divide. In terms of the frames, the execution of communications practice in the “treatments” is incredibly important and is a task that requires copious attention to ensure that the experiments are a fair test of the earlier qualitative findings and of communications practice. Exhibit 6.1 is an example of two treatments used in one of our experiments. The frames are made as parallel as possible (varying the number of words by no more than ten to fifteen words), and in some experimental studies, it is useful to test comprehension and the extent to which the executions convey the intended central idea. The fact that the surveys are online raises some concern about selection bias and the ability to extrapolate the findings to the population more broadly. This is quickly becoming less of an issue because recent research suggests that changes in phone use in the United States have made other forms of data collection, such as telephone surveys, much more difficult to conduct. In this light, Web-based surveys may actually be better venues to connect with diverse groups than more conventional telephone surveys.4 Perhaps more important, Web-based surveys have their own advantages, such as supporting a variety of different types of innovation that would be difficult or impossible using other methods like phone surveys. For example, we have tested the frame effects of visuals on the Web platform—something that would be much more difficult to do by telephone. new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd

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Exhibit 6.1. Example of a frame treatment All of the treatments receive: Lately there has been a lot of talk about the role of society in supporting children. In particular, people have offered various explanations of why it is important to devote societal resources to children at the very earliest stages of life. For example, some people believe that . . . Frame #1: Prosperity Early childhood development is important for community development and economic development. According to this view, skills and capacities that begin developing in early childhood become the basis of a prosperous and sustainable society—from positive school achievement to workforce skills to cooperative and lawful behavior. Have you heard of this explanation of why we should allocate societal assets to young children, because they predict our society’s prosperity?

Frame #2: Ingenuity Society needs to invent and replicate more effective policies and programs for young children. According to this view, innovative states have been able to design high-quality programs for children. These programs have solved problems in early childhood development and shown significant long-term improvements for children—but many counties don’t have access to these innovations. Have you heard of this explanation of why we should allocate societal resources to creating better solutions for young children?

Experimental research in action: Early childhood development Since 2001, the FrameWorks Institute, in collaboration with the National Scientific Council on the Developing Child, the National Forum on Early Childhood Program Evaluation, and the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University, has been engaged in a multiyear, multidiscipline study of how communications about early child development (ECD) influence public attitudes and policy preferences. In the effort to refine the communications recommendations, seventeen additional potentially constructive frame elements were taken into experimental testing in fall 2008. These seventeen discrete frame elements, while not exhaustive of potential ECD reframes, are important in part because they test very different ways of having the ECD conversation that could have implications for new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd

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public engagement. Because FrameWorks’ most extensive research base is in child development, we use this as an illustration and explication of what the experimental research contributes specifically to the multimethod, iterative approach to communications research. We tested the impact of these frames against several policyrelated outcome measures of interest, the most important of which we see as public support for policies that address children’s developmental needs. The experiments therefore are structured so that they capture the public’s level of support for discrete groups of policies and then to fully evaluate the effects of using different frames on those measures. We were especially interested to see whether several frames that had performed well in qualitative testing would fare well in a controlled experiment with a much larger (and diverse) sample of respondents. The findings reflect that more than anything else, framing the content of social messages on a wide variety of children’s policy issues has a great impact on policy support related to those issues. It is important to note for youth advocates that while our primary work has been looking at child development from the standpoint of early childhood, we also see this work as having implications for youth development more broadly. One of the biggest framing challenges, identified in both our child and youth research, is to improve people’s understanding of children’s and youth’s development and to show the societal implications of improving the developmental trajectories for both children and youth.5 The robustness of the findings from the early childhood research as well as the farreaching implications from this work are beyond the scope of this article.6 Even so, we highlight three key findings from the experimental research to help underscore how indispensable and illuminative the experimental method can be to an evidence-based communications practice: • Framing child development policies in terms of the values of prosperity or ingenuity proved to be extraordinarily promising and robust in their ability to lift public support for a wide variety of child-related policies. The prosperity frame treatment new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd

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focused the message on early childhood development as an engine for the sustainable growth of the nation. The ingenuity frame treatment focused on generating innovation to solve problems in early childhood development and the notion that the result of that ingenuity would be broadly shared across society. • The vulnerable child/fairness frame (a very common frame that child development experts and advocates use) had no demonstrable effect on any of the policy domains tested. That is, communicating to the public about the importance of child development policies from the vantage point of fairness to vulnerable children had no impact on any of the five policy batteries around children’s development that we tested. • The environment of relationships frame produced the most support for prioritizing children’s development and well-being— indeed, more than any other frame elements tested. The frame suggests that children develop in an environment of relationships and that the quality and reliability of a child’s relationships with trusted adults are essential to healthy development. • Several frames were shown to move respondents to consider a more active role for government in issues related to children’s development. One of the stronger frames able to shift thinking about the role of government was ingenuity. These and other treatment effects on policy support across batteries are illustrated in Table 6.1. These findings demonstrate a clear and consistent pattern of frame effects that have enormous implications for, and offer up strategic guidance to, child development researchers and advocates about the social messages they create to educate the public and policymakers about these issues. Unlike other approaches based in surveys of public opinion or a selection of focus group feedback sessions, experimental assessment of frame effects can quantifiably show the impact of framing on people’s policy evaluations and judgments. With even these brief exposures, audiences can shift their thinking to consider information in new ways and understand aspects of child development that are not available in the public disnew directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd

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Table 6.1. Values treatment effects across all policy batteries in the ECD experiments Frame element

Prosperity Treatment effect Effect size Level of statistical significance Ingenuity Treatment effect Effect size Level of statistical significance Future Treatment effect Effect size Level of statistical significance Responsible management Treatment effect Effect size Level of statistical significance Health as a value Treatment effect Effect size Level of statistical significance Vulnerable child/fairness Treatment effect Effect size Level of statistical significance

Mental Abuse/ Poverty/ health neglect Health/ Early work interventions prevention nutrition child care supports

.033 .07 .087*

.039 .11 .040**

.045 .11 .019**

.009 .01 .671

.034 .08 .054*

.033 .08 .082*

.048 .18 .010**

.041 .09 .034**

.038 .09 .069**

.030 .06 .086*

.016 .02 .416

.037 .10 .051*

.021 .02 .271

.018 .02 .408

.02 .00 .925

.015 .002 .419

.038 .11 .041**

.023 .03 .230

.013 .01 .559

.009 .006 .589

.020 .003 .290

.022 .004 .226

.033 .06 .083*

.005 .00 .820

.012 .010 .482

.009 .001 .628

.014 .002 .442

.021 .002 .270

.007 .000 .747

.003 .00 .862

*p ⱕ .10; **p ⬍ .05; statistically significant differences.

course (or that the frames trigger those models that have been latent and not given voice in the discourse). More generally, the findings underscore the value of the experimental approach. The ability to demonstrate to advocates how their patterns of communication with the public are actually received by the public and to offer proven alternative ways of communicating about social issues is invaluable. new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd

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Notes 1. For a good general discussion of experimental research see Dean, A., & Voss, D. (1999). Design and analysis of experiments. New York: Springer. For a discussion of social experiments see Orr, L. (1998). Social experiments: evaluating public programs with experimental methods. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. 2. We specifically make use of the national Web-based surveys conducted by YouGovPolimetrix. Polimetrix requires its 2 million panelists to participate in weekly studies in exchange for free Internet access. A two-stage sampling procedure is used to create a matched sample. First, a conventional random sample is drawn using an RDD sampling frame. At the second stage, Polimetrix mirrors the conventional sample by selecting panelists who most closely resemble each member of the random sample. The theory of random assignment in evaluation research design suggests that any variation between the control and the treatment groups not stemming from exposure to the stimuli of the treatments should be negligible or nonexistent. Even so, we typically test this proposition in our research by conducting a series of overall F-tests to determine if there were any systematic differences in the race, gender, education, and party affiliations between the treatment and control groups. 3. More generally, though, we use regression analysis as a technique because its flexibly allows us to measure the strength of the relationship between multiple variables of interest simultaneously (in this case, the various frame elements, our covariates, and our measures of policy support). 4. Keeter, S. (2009, February 27). New tricks for old—and new—dogs: Challenges and opportunities facing communications research. Keynote address to the 31st Annual Research Symposium College of Communication and Information, University of Tennessee. 5. FrameWorks Institute. (2005). Talking early child development and exploring the consequences of frame choices: A FrameWorks message memo. Washington, DC: FrameWorks Institute. FrameWorks Institute. (2001). Reframing youth issues for public understanding and support: A FrameWorks message memo. Washington, DC: FrameWorks Institute. 6. For more details, see the full report from the study. Manuel, T. (2009). Refining the core story of early childhood development: The effects of science and health frames. Washington, DC: FrameWorks Institute.

tiffany manuel is an expert in policy analysis and serves as research director at the FrameWorks Institute.


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Simple dissemination of communications research findings is not sufficient to improve the capacity of practitioners to incorporate strategic framing into a daily practice.

7 From research to practice: Communications for social change Lynn Davey frameworks institute’s mission is to build the communications capacity of the nonprofit sector. Over the ten years of our practice with nonprofit organizations and their funders, we have come to realize that achieving this goal necessitates coordination between the research we undertake and its dissemination, and that dissemination has to be constructed intentionally. In order for social issues advocates and experts to truly understand how to apply researchbased communications strategies to their work, they first have to understand what such an approach offers. Specifically, they need to understand why a research process is necessary to establish which messaging strategies work and which do not. We often find that social policy practitioners want communications about their issue to be easy. Given that most have been working for social change for some time and understand all too well the complexity of their issues, it is ironic, but expected, that we are frequently asked to reduce the research recommendations to a few sentences that might fit on an index card. Perhaps this construal of


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communications is an artifact of the typical structure of many nonprofit advocacy organizations. Although policy analysis, research, evaluation, and development are given their due as integral areas of many organizations’ work, communications is frequently treated as secondary to those areas viewed as core. Furthermore, it is often the case that policy and program staff generally do not consider themselves to be communicators on their issue or consider communications to require intentional practice. Our position is that doing communications strategically requires the same investment of intellect and study that these other areas of advocates’ practice have been accorded. FrameWorks Institute’s field-building strategies are designed to reflect that requirement of consideration and investment. We explain what works and why it works, and translate the communications research into curricula, tools, and applications that will assist policy advocates in applying the research to their regular communications practice. Thus, field building is the essential next step to all of our research investigations. In the four chapters that follow, we offer youth practitioners a peek inside the development of the institute’s field-building practice. We present two case studies of our work with child and youth advocates: an explanation of the development of strategic framing study circles, which are longer-term, curricular engagements with advocates that to date reflect the best practice of our strategic framing pedagogy; and an interview with a funder and participant in one of our study circles who attests to the challenges and opportunities of committing to a strategic communications practice. Strategic Frame Analysis, then, is both a method of empirical inquiry and a practice. The results of the empirical inquiry direct the content of our pedagogy by allowing us to explain how frame choices interact with people’s long-held beliefs about social issues, from pre-K, to afterschool, to childhood obesity. As a practice, it can be taught to advocates and incorporated into their everyday advocacy efforts. But successful communications requires something of advocates and experts as well: they have to understand new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd

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themselves to be framers of social problems, and not just those who are afforded communications titles but program and policy staff as well. Most important, they must understand that communications are not simply opportunities for creative expression; they are strategic and instrumental interpretive events. Our approach to this pedagogy of communications for social change is based in part on lessons from the scholarship on successful social movements. Specifically, we understand the work of policy advocates to be three-dimensional: mobilizing coalitions of support, targeting the collective as the locus of change, and highlighting the solutions that reside in systems and structures that serve to ensure the quality of life.1 Communications, then, is not an end in and of itself. Instead, it is an essential tool among many to be leveraged in collective social action toward systems change. Furthermore, communications for social change must be based on a model specific to building political will. Communications plays a vital role in determining which issues will move from the private realm to the public, which issues will become pressure points for policymakers, and which issues the public prioritizes for policy resolution. For communications to serve this agenda-setting function, it must encourage citizens to see themselves as citizens, not simply as consumers of information. Here is where the literature on social movements is also informative: it provides a model of communications for social change that is distinct from widespread approaches based in product marketing. Marketing-based approaches by definition treat the public as consumers of information, and it is the individual consumer who is targeted as the locus of change (for example, marketing-based approaches are seen in campaigns to stop smoking, designate a driver, and become financially literate).2 Commercial communication principles, such as sales-based messaging, market segmentation, and identity branding, do not align well with the goals of social movements, which are struggles over meaning as movements attempt to engage constituencies and influence public policy.3 new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd

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Unfortunately, it is these more market-based approaches that are so widely available and thus tend to infuse the public discourse on the solutions to entrenched social problems. Given the fact that efforts to ameliorate social problems have long time lines, do not entail a “point-of-purchase” decision, and require acceptance of their collective nature (in that they cannot be resolved by private actions alone), they require communications that are particular to public policy and programmatic change. From the perspective of social movements, framing refers to “the conscious, strategic efforts by groups of people to fashion shared understandings of the world and of themselves that legitimate and motivate collective action.”4 Message frames on social issues therefore must be judged by their ability to improve the public’s understanding of complex social problems, particularly the public dimensions of a problem’s cause and potential solutions. This is what our research process affords. Our experience is that diverse coalitions can be galvanized by the research. Our curricula allow us to inform the work of those on the ground who are eager to move policy using strategic and sustainable techniques. Practitioners come to understand how their issues are being framed in the media and by opponents, what the impact of those frames are on public understanding, and that appropriate strategies for response are rooted in a body of research that applies the cognitive, behavioral, and social sciences to the art of public discourse. This kind of unified research and resulting pedagogy has the potential to yield far greater value than the more intuitively driven advice and direction typically made available to social issues advocates. We work collaboratively to construct a curriculum that will best serve the needs and capacity of the specific coalitions with whom we engage. And while those we work with are diverse in terms of issue focus and professional status—from communications directors to research and policy analysts to nonprofit directors—all of our work is conducted with experienced, independent, and selfdirected professionals. They are focused on solving problems and applying their learning immediately to their own work. Recogniznew directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd

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ing this, we see the purpose of the evaluation of our field-building practice to be to improve teaching and learning, and not simply to assess satisfaction with our products and tools. In this way, our practice evaluation is closely aligned with Donald Kirkpatrick’s four steps, or hierarchy of evaluation, which he argued are required for effective evaluation of a program:5 1. Reaction. Do participants express satisfaction with the engagement? 2. Learning. Do participants in our engagements show knowledge of the core principles of strategic framing, both generally and specific to their issue (health care, youth development, rural issues)? 3. Behavior. Do participants in our engagements report changing their communications strategies to reflect the core principles of strategic framing, both generally and specific to their issue? 4. Results. Has the engagement had an impact beyond those convened, whether within aligned organizations or the broader community? In more concrete terms, we ask whether our products and curricula are being used and are considered useful to advocates’ communications challenges. What barriers and opportunities can they identify in their attempts to use these strategies in their own work? What new methods and technologies might be brought to bear on our practice? What is the reach of our field-building practice within and among organizations and over time? As Feinberg explains in her article in this volume, this ongoing assessment has led to the development of a core curriculum of technical assistance engagements in our Strategic Framing Study Circles. All of our field-building curricula are, by design, immersion experiences, with coalitions engaged in intensive instruction in workshops and Webinars, framing analyses of their own communications materials, and deconstruction and discussion of news stories and framing challenges with framing blogs. In addition, the coalitions with which we work are given access to framing digests new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd

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and tools—from interactive online workshops, to video illustrations, to online tool kits of resources and applications—designed to demonstrate the effective and ineffective use of core framing principles—from the use of values, metaphors, visuals, messengers, data, and the like. These tools are sometimes applications specific to the research conducted on an issue (for example, we have designed a multimedia, interactive online workshop to explain our research and resulting recommendations on framing rural issues), but many others are tools based on key framing principles that can be used across issues (for example, a stand-alone Webinar on the role of values in communications for social change, another on communicating effectively with data). In sum, our field-building strategies incorporate a mix of direct instruction in the perspective and methodology of Strategic Frame Analysis and are designed to help participants become effective inheritors of FrameWorks’ entire research portfolio, thereby extending the utility of this learning opportunity over time. After a course of interactive study and practice, participants can expect to: • Be conversant with the principles of Strategic Frame Analysis and the framing literature that informs it • Understand the research base necessary for decoding a particular social issue • Recognize frame cues and be able to deconstruct and analyze materials with reference to their strategic deployment • Apply the theory and research to their own work and the composition of relevant materials Returning to Kirkpatrick’s hierarchy, our internal evaluation data affirm that students are satisfied, learning, and changing behavior.6 But we have largely anecdotal and self-report evidence from our framing alumni in the field regarding broader community impact (see the article by Benjamin in this volume). We do know, as Vaughan explains in her article in the case of FrameWorks’ Watch Your Mouth campaign, that when research-based communications strategies drive a coordinated campaign of media, community outnew directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd

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reach, and legislative advocacy work, we can quantify community impact. This can be identified in the form of improvements in earned media placements, such as op-eds and letters to the editor, and in quantifiable shifts in public understanding and support for the issue (see the article by Vaughan in this volume). Another challenge we face is the one we hear most often when inquiring about the barriers advocates face to sustained framing practice. They often tell us that their national office, their colleagues in related organizations, or their funders are not in agreement on the importance of strategic communications. The challenge of the field is, perhaps, a challenge for the field. If those who work on behalf of children and youth are to achieve significant and sustained change, they must rely on communications principles and strategies that have been shown to improve public understanding and support. They must see themselves as framers of social problems, and they must be able to distinguish among effective and ineffective strategies. The articles that follow in Part Three offer the opportunity to explore what happens when advocates and their funders respond to this challenge by creating sustained communities of learning among those seeking to reframe the contours of the public discourse on behalf of children and youth. Notes 1. O’Neil, M. (2007). Movement building not marketing: Framing lessons from the social movements literature. Washington, DC: FrameWorks Institute. FrameWorks eZine, no. 36. See also Snow, D. A., Rochford, E. B., Jr., Worden, S. K., & Benford, R. D. (1986). Frame alignment processes, micromobilization, and movement participation. American Sociological Review, 51, 464–481. 2. Bales, S. N., & Gilliam, F. D., Jr. (2004). Communications for social good. New York: Foundation Center. 3. McCarthy, J. D., Smith, J., & Zald, M. N. (1996). Accessing public, media, electoral, and governmental agendas. In D. McAdam, J. D. McCarthy, & M. N. Zald (Eds.), Comparative perspectives on social movements: Political opportunities, mobilizing structures and cultural framings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 4. McCarthy, J. D., Smith, J., & Zald, M. N. (1996). Introduction: Opportunities, mobilizing structures, and framing processes—toward a synthetic, comparative perspective on social movements. In D. McAdam, J. D. McCarthy, & M. N. Zald (Eds.), Comparative perspectives on social movements: Political opportunities, mobilizing structures and cultural framings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. P. 6. new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd

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5. Kirkpatrick, D. L. (1971). A practical guide for supervisory training and development. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. See also Brookfield, S. (1986). Understanding and facilitating adult learning. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. 6. Kirkpatrick. (1971).

lynn davey is a developmental psychologist and serves as vice president at the FrameWorks Institute in Washington, D.C.


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This case study of FrameWorks Institute’s ten-year engagement with the Kids Count Network illustrates how child and youth policy advocates are using Strategic Frame Analysis to craft effective messages that support their policy goals.

8 Framing in the field: A case study Diane Benjamin child and youth policy advocates are constantly called on to craft messages to support better policies for children and their families locally and nationally. Whether working on health improvements, early childhood education, child abuse and neglect prevention, after-school programs, juvenile justice reform, or poverty reduction, they share a need for strong, effective messages that support their policy goals. Strategic Frame Analysis can inform the day-to-day practice of child policy advocates by bringing an evidence-based communications approach to their work. The Annie E. Casey Foundation acknowledged this need among its national Kids Count Network and has partnered with the FrameWorks Institute for more than ten years, bringing the lessons of Strategic Frame Analysis to this national network of data-driven projects that track the status of children. Don Crary, Kids Count state coordinator at the Annie E. Casey Foundation, says that advocacy groups traditionally have considered the mechanics of communications (how to write a press


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release, how to host a press conference) but have given little consideration to developing awareness of how people will understand and process the information they are receiving: “Everything an advocacy group does is impacted by what frame you’re working within. However, every issue will be framed; either you give it a frame, or people will frame it out of their own thinking.” Ten years of affiliation with the Kids Count Network has allowed the FrameWorks Institute a rare opportunity to focus on expanding, over time, the communications competence of a stable network of child advocates. For the first few years of this engagement, FrameWorks did what is typical of most communications firms: workshops on issue-based communications research, the creation of framing digests on topics of interest to the network, and oneon-one technical assistance focused on Strategic Frame Analysis theory, technique, and application. We then moved to providing Kids Count projects with examples and analyses of framing children’s issues in the news as a way of demonstrating the role communications could play in their own advocacy work, and offering opportunities for discussions of communications research and framing practice between the network and FrameWorks staff. Over time it became clear that we had developed a core group of committed communications practitioners within the Kids Count Network who, as veterans of FrameWorks trainings and resources, could begin to form an informal peer network to address common communications challenge. We then instituted a multipronged approach that our technical assistance evaluations suggested was necessary to expand the core capacity of the network as a whole and continue to advance the Strategic Frame Analysis curriculum for those more consistently engaged in applying strategic framing to their advocacy work. A further challenge was that staff turnover within state projects required us to regularly revisit framing fundamentals with some while continuing to offer advanced training to others. We continued to provide workshops and Webinars to acquaint the entire network with new framing research pertinent to data-based child advocacy, but also assisted a handful of state projects that had long-term policy initiatives under way in more new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd

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coordinated and extended technical assistance engagements with FrameWorks’ field-building staff. What follows are examples of the application of strategic framing from two of the state projects that have had the opportunity for extended technical assistance and have made the commitment to strategic framing practice across their work as child advocates. Linda O’Neal, executive director of the Tennessee Commission on Children and Youth and the Tennessee Kids Count grantee, has used FrameWorks materials and technical assistance for more than a decade. When asked what is most valuable from this approach, she states that it helps her “focus on the common values that people have on outcomes for children, whether we’re conservative or liberal, that we all can agree on.” The Tennessee Commission has depended on framing research for its annual Kids Count reports. For example, while writing the 2006 “Blueprint for the Success of Children in Tennessee” report, staff were aware of FrameWorks’ research showing that people have difficulty understanding the environments that either hinder or support child and youth development (a finding reported in the articles in this volume by Kendall-Taylor and by Manuel regarding the institute’s research on public understanding of early childhood issues).1 Thus, they chose to incorporate this research by focusing the text of the report on the infrastructure, systems, and structures that make the state successful. This is in contrast to simply reporting on a set of dismal facts about child and youth problems and letting readers draw their own conclusions about solutions. They also incorporated values and simplifying models from FrameWorks’ research on child and youth development to offer readers a clarifying story of how stable, responsive early environments help children grow. They continued this focus in subsequent publications, including the next year’s report, “Opportunity for All Children in Tennessee,” and in recent newsletter articles addressing state budget cuts. O’Neal notes that as her project has become more consistent about using this research-based approach, the public communications of the commission have reflected this researchbased approach.2 new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd

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A new Kids Count Network member, the Social Science Research Center at Mississippi State University, completed intensive technical assistance with FrameWorks staff in early 2009 to better frame its statewide data book, promotional video, and kickoff event associated with the release of the data book. The center originally conceived of the data book and accompanying video as a chance to showcase individual projects throughout the state that were making a difference in the lives of low-income children and youth. As is true of many fact-based reports, its data cataloguing problems and trends were not well aligned with the policy solutions staff sought to promote. The final product began with an introduction that laid the groundwork for understanding child and youth development as essential to the future prosperity of the state.3 Since FrameWorks’ research also shows that the public tends to view parents as solely responsible for either the success or failure of children and youth,4 the accompanying stories were rewritten to highlight structures and environments as much as possible and the video was edited to reinforce those messages. Linda Southward, Mississippi Kids Count director, had this to say about the experience: “FrameWorks has given us a new perspective on determining the best ways we can use data. They really helped us zero in on the interconnectedness of various systems and how those systems working together can create positive results for children and communities. We were able to highlight success stories around our state and frame those in ways that we think can begin to get traction for some positive movement.” Southward believes that incorporating strategic message framing into the work of child advocacy is absolutely critical: “If you don’t get the message out there in the ways that decision/policy makers can understand how critical these issues are in children’s lives, then you are going down the wrong road.” With the continued support of the Annie E. Casey Foundation, FrameWorks has created a large body of resources to meet the needs of child advocates, including a series of written framing guidelines, a workshop on framing basics, downloadable Webinars on specific frame elements, a comprehensive issue framing manual, and new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd

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a series of online framing digests on various framing challenges and strategies. These tools reach far beyond the Kids Count Network itself to benefit many additional local and national advocates, policymakers, funders, and community leaders. But it is certainly the individual technical assistance opportunities, which the foundation supports each year, that offer the best examples of how hands-on teaching and framing pedagogy can change the course of advocates’ communications practice. And it is precisely FrameWorks’ experience with the Kids Count Network, and our constant assessment and evaluation of the resources and tools we provide, that supplied the data allowing us to reflect on how and what to teach, how and what works, and why it works. These data were invaluable in FrameWorks’ creation of a core curriculum for framing practice (see Feinberg’s article in this volume). With the continued support of the Annie E. Casey Foundation, Kids Count projects are making the best use of evidence-based communications opportunities to improve the well-being of America’s children and families and have provided a consistent community of learners that have significantly informed FrameWorks’ evolving field-building practice. Notes 1. See FrameWorks Institute. (2005). Talking early child development and exploring the consequences of frame choices: A FrameWorks message memo. Washington, DC: FrameWorks Institute; FrameWorks Institute. (2001). Reframing youth issues for public understanding and support: A FrameWorks message memo. Washington, DC: FrameWorks Institute. 2. See, for example, O’Neal, L. (2009). Partnerships boost family policies. Retrieved August 24, 2009, from http://www.tennessean.com/article/20090812/OPINION01/908120365/1008/Partnerships+boost+family+policies. 3. Manuel, T. (2009). Refining the core story of early childhood development: The effects of science and health frames. Washington, DC: FrameWorks Institute. 4. See Aubrun, A., & Grady, J. (2003). Two cognitive obstacles to preventing child abuse: The “other mind” mistake and the “family bubble.” Washington, DC: FrameWorks Institute; Frameworks Institute. (2001, 2005).

diane benjamin is a senior associate at the FrameWorks Institute.


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This case study highlights the important role that evidence-based communications plays in successful issue campaigning.

9 Campaigning for children’s oral health: A case study Kate Vaughan in 2000, the u.s. surgeon general released the first-ever report on the oral health of Americans. Prior to its release, a group of funders recognized the important opportunity this report presented and engaged the FrameWorks Institute in the work of developing a campaign that would help advocates place children’s oral health on the public agenda. In the year leading up to the release of the surgeon general’s report, FrameWorks conducted research to gauge Americans’ understanding of children’s oral health.1 This research resulted in FrameWorks’ development of a comprehensive campaign, Watch Your Mouth. To date, four states have implemented Watch Your Mouth, with impressive results. The Watch Your Mouth campaign is different from many other public campaigns in that it is designed to increase the public’s understanding of children’s oral health and its support for the public policies that will improve oral health more generally. This is accomplished by applying empirically tested communications strategies to media, community, and legislative advocacy work. The


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campaign is most effective when these three components have a complementary relationship. Many issue campaigns hope to achieve change by appealing to the public as consumers. This approach generally asks the public to make better choices for themselves (for example, “Brush three times a day”). Although some individuals may change their own behavior as a result of this approach, it does not contribute to greater understanding of the issue at hand or increased support for the public policies that are the most effective ways to address it. By focusing on changing individual behavior, advocates inadvertently make it more difficult for the public to understand the important role communities play in solving the problems associated with poor oral health in children. Advocates may also work to bring their issue to the attention of the news media, only to find that the articles published focus on the plight of individuals rather than the policy solutions they wish to advance. Putting the issue in front of people is not enough to make change for social issues. This is particularly true for oral health, a serious health issue that has long been on the sidelines of children’s issues and often considered a luxury for adults. To make lasting policy change, advocates must change the public conversation about their issue by improving understanding of the importance of oral health so it is seen as both a serious health issue and one for which public and community-based solutions can improve outcomes. The Watch Your Mouth campaign advocates evidence-based framing strategies, as well as tools and resources, to accomplish just that.

Developing the campaign To start the process of developing a comprehensive public campaign, FrameWorks conducted an analysis of existing survey research on oral health, a series of cognitive interviews, focus groups, and ultimately a national survey.2 What FrameWorks discovered was familiar to oral health advocates: the public did not understand what defines and contributes to children’s oral health, the consequences of ignoring it, and what new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd

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might be done to improve it. Children’s oral health was an issue that was largely missing from the public agenda concerning child health or children’s issues in general. FrameWorks found that when Americans were prompted to consider oral health, they focused on cavities as the principal outcome of poor oral health. Further, they considered cavities a problem only insofar as having “bad teeth” may affect appearance and self-esteem.3 As a result of thinking along these lines, the responsibility for improving children’s oral health is considered to be one of parental discipline for children’s brushing and flossing. Solutions such as parental education, individual behavior change, and consumer outreach then become most easy to think. But this individualized understanding of the issue excludes from the conversation public solutions that advocates and experts know will improve oral health for children, such as school-based oral health programming, increased access to dental insurance, and community water fluoridation. The research also uncovered some good news: the fact that children’s oral health was an issue hidden from the public conversation meant that advocates would not be fighting deeply entrenched frames about the issue, and the release of the surgeon general’s report provided an opportunity to influence the conversation in a productive way. In addition, FrameWorks found that when oral health was contextualized as part of overall health, most adults could understand the important connections between the two. In fact, when the public understood that oral health was a true and important health issue, they showed a relatively high level of support for the solutions advocates seek to advance.

Watch Your Mouth The purpose of the Watch Your Mouth campaign is to help advocates and experts reframe children’s oral health in order to advance public policy solutions to this widespread problem. The campaign builds on the power of community and policy advocacy by coordinating these strategies with extensive opinion pieces in newspapers and letters to the editor, along with paid media activity. new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd

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FrameWorks’ research suggests a number of clear and effective ways to improve public understanding of the importance of oral health. Key to this reframing is an emphasis on the prevalence and severity of the problem, its consequences, and the efficacy of prevention in solving this problem. The following message was created to incorporate these elements. Key elements of the message are noted in brackets: Dental disease is the single most common, chronic disease of childhood and it is one of the most frequently reported reasons that children miss school. Caused by a bacterial infection in the mouth, this disease affects half of all children by the time they reach the first grade [prevalence and severity]. Untreated dental disease can impact a child’s ability to eat, sleep, and pay attention in school. The absences that occur as a result of dental disease translate into lost learning time and lost opportunities [consequences]. The good news is that when children have early access to preventive care such as dental sealants and fluoride treatments, we can prevent the majority of dental disease from ever occurring [efficacy of prevention].

FrameWorks’ research shows that this type of strategic framing results in public reconsideration of the issue and improved support for the policy solutions necessary to improve children’s oral health for all children.4

Results Since 2000, the Watch Your Mouth campaign has been implemented in Washington State, Massachusetts, Maine, and New Hampshire. Each campaign required the participation of a statewide coalition working toward the advancement of specific policy priorities. Combining community organizing and policy advocacy with a paid and earned media strategy helped each state to elevate children’s oral health to become a legitimate children’s health issue. We report data from Massachusetts, for which we have the most robust results, as the campaign has been running for five consecutive years. new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd

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In 2005, Massachusetts launched Watch Your Mouth to complement the policy advocacy work of the statewide Oral Health Advocacy Taskforce. Annual campaign tracking surveys have shown remarkable increases in the public’s overall understanding that oral health is essential to overall health and in support of policies that will improve oral health.5 After the first year alone, significantly more respondents understood that children with poor oral health would be more likely to face other health problems (an increase of more than percentage points from the precampaign baseline).6 Five years of campaigning in Massachusetts has effectively reshaped public understanding of children’s oral health; residents have become more likely to recognize the importance of screening and preventive care and reject the assertion that brushing and flossing alone will ensure children’s oral health.7 In addition to shifts in public understanding and support, Massachusetts made important policy advances over this period, from reinstating Medicaid Dental benefits for all adults in the state, to passing an omnibus oral health bill that mandated a state office of oral health with a state dental director, and created new classifications of oral health professionals that will help to increase access to care.8

Conclusion Oral health is a serious health issue that deserves the attention and support of the public and its decision makers. Since 2000, FrameWorks Institute’s Watch Your Mouth campaign has helped statebased advocacy organizations gain ground on this important issue. Implementing a coordinated public campaign such as Watch Your Mouth has a tremendous impact on the general understanding of the issue of children’s oral health and the capacity of the public to advocate for and understand community-based solutions. Notes 1. Bales, S. N. (1999). Framing children’s oral health for public attention and support: A FrameWorks message memo. Washington, DC: FrameWorks Institute. new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd

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2. Bales, S. N. (2005). FrameWorks research on children’s oral health: Details. Washington, DC: FrameWorks Institute. 3. Bales. (2005). 4. Bales. (2005). 5. FrameWorks Institute. (2008). Massachusetts children’s oral health campaign public opinion tracking July 2005–2008. Washington, DC: FrameWorks Institute. 6. FrameWorks Institute. (2006). Watch Your Mouth campaign: Data from the public opinion tracking surveys, July 2005 (benchmark), June 2006 (post-test). Washington, DC: FrameWorks Institute. 7. FrameWorks Institute. (2008). 8. Flieger, S. P., & Doonan, M. T. (2009). Putting the mouth back in the body: Improving oral health across the commonwealth. Boston: Massachusetts Health Policy Forum.

kate vaughan is a senior associate at the FrameWorks Institute. She is the former director of the Massachusetts Watch Your Mouth campaign.


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To help experts and advocates integrate the art and science of Strategic Frame Analysis into their daily communications practice, FrameWorks Institute developed an intensive curriculum known as the Strategic Framing Study Circle.

10 Strategic Framing Study Circles: Toward a gold standard of framing pedagogy Jane Feinberg during the past decade, advocates and experts across the nonprofit landscape have often asked FrameWorks, “Can people really learn Strategic Frame Analysis?” Our reply, an affirmative one, might be described as a hybrid of the old joke: “How do you get to Carnegie Hall?” It’s possible, we say, but it takes practice. As requests for such practice have grown over the years, FrameWorks has reassessed its pedagogy, which in the early years was delivered largely through one- or two-day workshops, sometimes followed by a short course of technical assistance. We asked ourselves how we could expand and deepen our pedagogy; what we could build that would enable advocates to practice the science and art of framing over an extended period of time, thereby increasing the chances of long-term mastery; and whether we could design something along the lines of a community of practice that would


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draw on the lessons learned in working with the Kids Count Network, as Benjamin recounts in her article in this volume, and move to an even deeper level of engagement. Our response was the Strategic Framing Study Circle—a series of workshops with a variety of reinforcements: handouts, monthly written assignments by electronic lists, and intensive technical assistance. With support from the Barr Foundation, we piloted the first study circle in Massachusetts, a place where we sensed an appetite for an experience of this nature among experts and advocates in the child- and youth-serving arena. An invitation letter went out to community leaders, and we eventually recruited more than a dozen senior people from the nonprofit sector: executive directors of intermediary organizations, foundation presidents and program officers, communications managers, and university faculty and staff. The group convened four times over the course of a year, and the response was overwhelmingly positive. Participants gained some framing mastery, and many went back to their organizations armed with a new way of thinking about communications. When the Massachusetts study circle ended, FrameWorks staff spent some time evaluating what worked well and what needed adjusting. We realized, for instance, that students would be better served by a shorter, more intensive experience that helped framing competency and group momentum to build more quickly. We also recognized the challenges of building community by electronic lists and that we would need to create other opportunities for group interaction. On the positive side, we learned that many of our strategies worked well and could be easily replicated. For example, toward the end of the study circle, each participant submitted a document that showed reframing for review by FrameWorks staff. These documents were then presented to the individual participants and the group at large. Participants reported that this aspect of the experience solidified their understanding of framing theory and practice and provided them with a set of concrete examples that they could take back to the office. Perhaps most important, the Massachusetts Study Circle provided a solid foundation on which to build a more formal curricunew directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd

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lum, which we did shortly after the Massachusetts Study Circle ended. The new model had a syllabus, a textbook, a set of live Webbased seminars, a series of biweekly online assignments, a comprehensive materials review process, and a blog space for discussion. In addition, three face-to-face workshops would be spread across a six-month period rather than over the course of a year. A few months later, we had an opportunity to test this new model in three states: Maine, in which a wide range of nonprofit, government agency, and faith leaders learned how to talk about government; North Carolina, where advocates, philanthropists, and government officials came together to study how to talk about children and youth; and South Carolina, in which frontline advocates and community volunteers focused on how to talk about early child development. (As of this writing, we are conducting a third cohort of study circles: one on health care reform with Catholic ministries around the country and another in New England on early child development.) Across all of these engagements, we’ve been able to identify a number of recurring themes with respect to the impact on participants and the use of framing within their organizations and beyond: Participants begin to think very differently about the news media. Study circle members tell us that reading the newspaper and watching television is an entirely different experience for them. Many have said that the Study Circle made them savvier about what they see and hear and that they think more critically about the way issues are framed. Others have commented that they are aware of how personal stories in the media can turn an issue into a personal problem rather than a broader, systemic problem. Participants begin to manage the media and respond to media calls differently. Many study circle members develop a new outlook on working with reporters. For instance, many participants who receive calls from journalists who are looking to interview individuals new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd

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representing the extent of the social problem are able to shift the story to a broader and more global perspective. They are also more attentive to how they are quoted, making sure that their statements are well framed. Participants audit their own organization’s materials. When they recognize unproductive communications habits, they work with colleagues to reframe key documents. Many study circle participants talk about how they now spend much less time and energy refuting the opposition’s frame, focusing instead on making a strong argument using values, metaphors, and data in a more thoughtful way. They also report that they write dramatically different press releases, op-eds, letters to the editor, Web copy, and annual reports. In the case of a Massachusetts organization promoting a particular education–youth development reform, the previous year’s annual report was framed from an individualistic vantage point. The photographs, in particular, telegraphed individual solutions, even though the organization’s aim was to create public will for a new set of policies and programs (Figure 10.1). The study circle participant recognized the problem, and for the next year’s annual report, they worked closely with staff to widen the lens on the story they were telling. The result was a beautifully framed piece about an innovative statewide program that is gaining traction around the country (Figure 10.2). In another case, a study circle participant from a child abuse prevention agency in North Carolina wrote a press release about the number of children who died at the hands of a parent or caregiver. Her first draft, headlined “New 2007 Child Homicide Numbers Illustrate Need for Greater Family Support,” unwittingly portrayed the families in a negative light: Newly released data by the N.C. Child Fatality Prevention Team shows the critical need for family support across North Carolina. In 2007, 25 North Carolina children died at the hand of a parent or caregiver. “While this number reveals the worst of what can happen to a child, it also reveals families in crisis,” said Prevent Child Abuse North Carolina new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd

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Figure 10.1. Cover of the 2006–2007 Massachusetts Expanded Learning Time Initiative annual report

CEO and President Rosie Allen. “By helping families who might be struggling and teaching them to be strong parents, we can help prevent these tragedies.” . . . Parents who do not have the support or skills they need to interact with their children in healthy ways are sometimes at risk of lashing out at their children. These risks become greater when families face external stressors and do not have strong parenting skills to fall back on. Families reflected in the 2007 fatality numbers included those facing financial hardship, the stresses of being a military family and mental health crises.

Recognizing that the press release reinforced negative stereotypes about families in need, she rewrote the press release, this time new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd

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Figure 10.2. Cover of the 2007–2008 Massachusetts Expanded Learning Time Initiative annual report

titled, “Broken Community Support System Illustrated by 2007 Child Homicides,” to focus on the gaps in community support of families: Newly released data by the N.C. Child Fatality Prevention Team shows that North Carolina communities are not providing enough support to families in increasingly stressful times. In 2007, 25 North Carolina children died at the hand of a parent or caregiver. “This number shows the worst effects of stress experienced by families across our state,” said Prevent Child Abuse North Carolina CEO and new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd

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President Rosie Allen. “By helping families who might be struggling, we can help prevent these tragedies.” . . . In an environment where families experience greater stress—including increasingly difficult economic times, lack of access to health and mental health services and fewer community supports—children are at a greater risk of being abused. Indeed, families included in the 2007 fatality statistics include families struggling financially, military families and families facing mental health crises.

Participants use their new framing skills to give legislative testimony and speak to civic groups. For example, a faith leader representing Maine’s Council of Churches used her newly found framing skills to give testimony at the Maine legislature. An excerpt demonstrates her mastery of values-based messaging: “In our freedom, each of us, and all of us together, are called to do our part to sustain the whole interdependent web of human community and of God’s creation. We are here to share one another’s burdens as well as the benefits of our common life.” Emerging coalitions are strengthened, and groups sometimes continue their work together in some form after the study circle. In North Carolina, for example, the study circle consisted of a disparate group of advocates, but many of them have continued to collaborate. A core group is now seeking funding to bring framing expertise and technical assistance to a wider constituency in the state. Many advocates in North Carolina are beginning to speak with a common voice, and participants have reported that the framing language on early child development is seeping into the media and the public conversation. As effective as the Strategic Framing Study Circle has proved to be thus far, considerable challenges remain. One is the sheer challenge of carving out time in people’s schedules. Most of the leaders we work with are seasoned professionals. They welcome the opportunity to pull back from the daily grind, but there is always some tension between the urgency of work and the demands of the study circle curriculum. Another challenge for participants has been new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd

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educating others in their organization about the framing approach. Study circle participants have expressed disappointment about the compromises they have had to make when public affairs and communications departments, mostly schooled in traditional public relations practices, push back. This is especially true for state-based groups that are affiliates of large national organizations. A third challenge is continuity: making framing an institutional competence that is not tied to a single individual. Turnover is common in the nonprofit sector, and some participants worry that framing will not live beyond their tenure in a given organization. FrameWorks embraces these challenges. We view them as an opportunity to continue refining the strategic framing study circle and have put into place a rigorous set of evaluation measures to determine the extent to which we have met our goals and where we have fallen short. As a pedagogical approach, the study circle is a far cry from the days of one-off presentations. But we have yet to build the critical mass that will make evidence-based communications a given in the world of nonprofit advocacy. jane feinberg is a senior associate at the FrameWorks Institute and board member of the Program in Education, Afterschool and Resiliency (PEAR) at Harvard University and McLean Hospital.


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The following interview provides a case study of how one foundation, led by a program officer who also helped spearhead a study circle, has worked to incorporate strategic framing into its organizational strategy.

11 Embracing the long view: A funder’s perspective on Strategic Frame Analysis Jane Feinberg, Curt McPhail for almost a decade, FrameWorks Institute has worked with the Mary Black Foundation of Spartanburg, South Carolina. A private foundation serving the largest county in South Carolina since 1996, its core mission is to “improve health and wellness of individuals and communities.” The foundation defines health and wellness broadly—as complete physical, mental, and social well being—and devotes the majority of its resources to efforts that address the underlying causes of poor health outcomes. Its grant making is in two priority areas: active living and early childhood development. FrameWorks’ Jane Feinberg talked recently with Curt McPhail, the foundation’s program officer, about the role of communications in the foundation’s work and in philanthropy at large. Excerpts from that interview follow:


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JF: What role does communications play within the foundation itself and with respect to your grantees? CM: We’ve always considered strategic communications to be an important priority, but I don’t think we’ve always fully understood what that meant. Early on, communications was about spreading the word about what we were doing and what the grantees were doing. We have always been and still are less focused on getting recognition as a foundation, but more about getting the work, and the issues that our grantees are working on, out in front of people. Another way we pursued communications was by holding special events. They were good, and creative, and geared to really provoking thought and dialogue. But I think, in retrospect, some of our events were heavy on short-term strategy and lacked long-term vision. For example, if somebody was coming to town—for example, when [early childhood expert] Jack Shonkoff came to town to talk about the early brain development of young children—we knew it was important to get parents of young children to hear Shonkoff speak. We also thought it would be important to draw in folks who worked in the field of early care and education and in the public school system. So our strategy was very short term in terms of gathering a crowd, but it was never part of a bigger picture or initiative around communications. JF: Has that approach changed at all in the last few years? CM: Yes, it has started to change for lots of different reasons, one of them being the economy. JF: What do you mean? CM: As a foundation, we’ve come to realize that giving away money is really only one tool in our toolbox to make change and achieve our mission. So we began to realize that as the economy took a downturn, so did our grant-making ability. But that didn’t mean that our ability to communicate about our issues and work to make changes through communications had to falter as well. And so while our grant-making budget went down, our trustees actually brought on a communications officer, realizing that we could still continue to work toward achieving our mission, but that it would possibly look a little bit different in these strained economic new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd

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times because we would be focusing our efforts on communicating about our issues as opposed to funding organizations. JF: That’s fascinating because I think many foundations might have made the opposite decision—that is, communications would be the first function on the chopping block. CM: I think you’re right. The economy really helped serve as the tipping point for us. But I should say that for several years, we’ve recognized, that particularly in the arena of early child development, we just weren’t getting the traction we needed. We knew we were improving the care and education of those folks who were in the child care centers that our grantees were working in, and we knew in the long run that as folks cycled through those centers, they would receive quality care experiences. But what we were struggling with was convincing policymakers and local leaders that this was really an issue intrinsically linked to the future success of our city and our communities. We also knew that without that buyin, we would be short-selling our success for years and years to come. A few things made this especially clear. One was a lack of leadership and understanding on the state level to enact a quality rating system for child care centers—a sort of star system based on the quality of the education. If you’re close to this and understand the research on the benefits of early care and education, it’s just plain common sense that this would be a great thing to support. But very quickly the effort was quashed by the advocacy efforts of folks within the private child care industry. That event helped us realize that if we wanted to make changes, we needed to be as savvy as those folks who were advocating against what we were advocating for. So we began to think about how to help our [grantee] organizations go out and advocate for themselves. Ultimately it came down to how we communicate in a way that will eventually change policy, but also changes folks’ minds to jump on the bandwagon and work with us. JF: But how did you know that communications was the tool— because many advocates do not consider it a core part of advocacy work? new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd

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CM: Personally . . . well, prior to joining the Mary Black Foundation, I had been working in the field of violence prevention and was exposed to FrameWorks’ approach to communications, particularly the connection between effective communication and good advocacy. So coming to the foundation with my background as a community organizer, I knew that if you can’t communicate effectively about what you are trying to change, then you might as well just give it up, especially if you’re trying to convince policymakers. In addition, the foundation had listed communications as a strategy and recognized that there are successful approaches out there and that we didn’t need to reinvent the wheel. I think it’s also worth saying that in the realm of advocacy, as a private foundation, there are things we can and cannot do. Communications is one thing that we definitely can do. JF: To your mind, what is the advantage of a communications approach that is evidence based? CM: I struggle with this question because I keep wondering, given the choice between a message that has been tested and proven to work, and a message that hasn’t been tested or proven to work, why would anyone want the latter? Obviously there’s a cost attached to the choice, but I would rather pay a little bit more on the front end knowing that I’m going to get a return than paying a little bit on the front end and gambling on whether I’m going to get the return I want. I do think this is a potential role that philanthropy can play—getting communicators on the science-based, evidence-based communication bandwagon. A group of foundations might come together to figure out how they can be more effective, call together those folks whom they know work with their grantees, and educate them on helping their grantees tell messages that have been proven to change policies. JF: That’s an interesting idea. Last year, the Mary Black Foundation funded a Strategic Framing Study Circle in South Carolina, which brought advocates together over a six-month period of time to study the framing of early child development. Why did you allocate the funding to such an intensive effort, and what did you hope new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd

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it would produce for your grantees and for the broader community of early child development advocates? CM: I think as we looked at our work, particularly in early childhood development, and we looked at how effective it was being, it was obvious that we were being really effective on the ground level and on the direct service level. But we also recognized that for us to achieve the ultimate goal, and for this community to really understand the connections between high-quality early care and education, and the future success of all of our citizens, we needed to do more. In particular we needed to convince parents, policymakers, and other folks who had some sort of vested interest in our community’s future that this was an important community priority. And we began to realize that, okay, if that’s the goal, then we’ve got to start communicating with people in an effective way, and we also realized that we needed to start communicating in the same way, so that there weren’t fifteen different messages but rather a couple of core messages out there. It wasn’t the first time we had worked with Frameworks, and we knew that if we wanted to look at messages that had been rigorously tested, and proven to be effective, then we needed to look to FrameWorks. JF: What do you think the participants learned? CM: I think we learned that by sitting around the table and listening to how folks were talking about the work they were doing, we heard a lot of people talk about the individual challenges that people in the community are facing: the young mother who can’t finish high school without attending our program or the lowincome mother who has more children than she can take care of, and how are they going to improve their lot in life without quality care and education. Folks were telling stories about individuals. We know from FrameWork’s research, and we know from our own experience, that the human interest approach makes the public think that all we have to do is fix those individuals and be done with it—as opposed to really making long-lasting and systemic changes. So I think we’ve learned that. We also learned that communicating new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd

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for policy change is long-term work and that learning how to frame well requires time and extraordinary willingness. JF: It seems you’re saying that you can’t become conversant in the approach overnight. CM: You really can’t. To get really good at it requires a commitment. And as a funder, we can’t force people to drink this and realize how important it is. We can provide them the opportunity, but they also have to be a willing participant in understanding the ultimate benefit that it will have. That said, I think one of the things that we learned that we would potentially do differently is spend more time on the front end, really gauging folks’ interest and commitment and getting them really primed to jump into this. JF: What would that look like? What would be different about Study Circle 2.0? CM: I think 2.0 would probably spend some time exposing prospective participants to the FrameWorks approach, so that they could get a taste of the work and to see if it triggers a response like it did with me a decade ago. In other words, the approach is not for everyone, and it would be good to find out sooner rather than later if the person is likely to be a good fit for the study circle. I also think we have to constantly be asking: Who is the right person to be at the table? Going into this, we thought the right people to be at the table would be advocates and folks who worked for organizations. And don’t get me wrong, those were good folks to be at the table, but I also think we missed out by not looking further, deeper, wider, for folks who may not be actively involved in the work on an everyday basis but are passionate and gifted and have a sphere of influence. The single person who probably got the most out of the study circle was a community member who serves on a couple of different boards and is active in other things, but early childhood isn’t her first passion. JF: What about the study circle pedagogy? Would you change anything? CM: No, I think the pedagogy of it all was right on. I think FrameWorks’ approach to this is very logical—you know, the core lessons of framing, if you will, that were constantly referred back new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd

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to so that folks could really begin to see those as their learning progressed. The other things that I think were incredibly valuable for the organizations, and the folks who were in the study circle, were the opportunities to look at written materials and deconstruct them and begin to identify the poorly framed messages. The harder thing to do is to construct a well-framed message from scratch. And I think that’s always the challenge, and even for someone like myself who has been in it, and around it, and loves it, and gets it—it’s still not the easiest thing in the world to do. JF: As our colleague Frank Gilliam likes to say about framing, “It’s hard because it’s hard.” CM: Right. I don’t know how to change the pedagogy to make that any different other than giving people the opportunity to practice. There’s a role that philanthropy can and should play. I think philanthropy has to help facilitate some of the message creation and deconstruction and continue to refresh folks. So I think 2.0 might have some more of that. It also may have some more refresher courses that happen using technology. Every six months or so folks could spend a couple of hours watching a Webinar and learning about new research, but also practicing the approach. JF: Has FrameWorks’ approach taken hold in any surprising ways that you can think of? CM: You know, I think the foundation in particular is thinking about our communications a lot differently now. JF: How would you characterize the change? CM: I just think we’re much more strategic about the stories we want to tell, or at least are attempting to be much more strategic. In a perfect world, philanthropy wouldn’t finish up one project and move on to the next. But unfortunately, that’s how things work. I haven’t been able to spend as much time as I would like fostering the relationships and the learning among the people who participated in the study circle. But some of the people, on their own, have firmly taken on FrameWorks’ approach and sought additional technical assistance after the study circle ended. JF: Is there any other advice you would give foundations and other organizations that are considering Strategic Frame Analysis or new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd

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evidence-based communications? What do they need to know going in? CM: Well, I do think they’ve got to realize that it’s a process and that it’s hard, but in the end, you’re really building individual and collective capacity to make lasting change. So it’s an investment of time and energy and passion in the front end. Again, the economy taught us at the Mary Black Foundation that grant making was just one tool in our toolbox toward achieving our mission. Because that tool was the hardest hit when our budgets decreased, we had to start looking through our toolbox to figure out other ways to accomplish our objectives. So communications is now a huge part of what we do. It is a proven, effective, and really good way to effect change. jane feinberg is a senior associate at the FrameWorks Institute and board member of the Program in Education, Afterschool and Resiliency (PEAR) at Harvard University and McLean Hospital. curt mcphail is the program officer at the Mary Black Foundation in Spartanburg, South Carolina.


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Aligning child and youth development with popular topics in the news, from education to health, can have unintended consequences if the associations people make with those topics serve to undermine policy support.

12 Lessons from the story of early child development: Domain decisions and framing youth development Susan Nall Bales, Franklin D. Gilliam Jr. what should define the strategic in strategic framing? And how should it be measured? Is it sufficient to demonstrate that a certain way of positioning an issue will create more news? Should a framing strategy be held accountable to only a discrete set of policies? Or is it possible to identify a framing strategy that can work across multiple policy domains—pre-K and mental health, youth development and poverty supports—serving to advance multiple-policy coalitions? This article maintains that strategy derives from a complex understanding of frame coherence. In particular, this understanding calls for a closer examination of the ways in which the “pictures in people’s heads” are activated by exposure to any part of a frame. We focus on a key arena of frame contestation, the issue domain, and demonstrate, using FrameWorks’ research on framing child This article was developed with support from the A. L. Mailman Foundation.


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development, that by choosing to align child development with specific domains, communicators may serve to further entrench public thinking in ways that imperil expert policy recommendations.1 Put in more colloquial terms, we explore the consequences of framing a developmental agenda through such issue domains as health, education, and workforce facilitation. In general, these findings suggest important considerations for any practitioner who wishes to engage the public in rethinking child and youth policy. Over the years, FrameWorks has developed a useful taxonomy of frame elements to help deconstruct a communication in order to identify which elements might prove most useful for more positive effects on public thinking. 2 These elements include such aspects of narrative as the messengers used to convey an idea, the visuals that accompany the idea, the simplifying models or metaphors that are used to concretize the idea, the tone with which the idea is imbued, and the values that connect the idea to what Williams has called “standards of desirability that are more nearly independent of specific situations.”3 The existence of these frame elements is supported in the theoretical literatures of various disciplines4 and their selective power on thinking further validated by FrameWorks Institute’s research across a wide array of topics.5 This approach pays careful attention to the orchestration of these frame elements in order to construct frames that maximize the power of each frame cue by working as a coherent whole to direct and support meaning. As such, this approach tracks nicely with recent neuroscience research on multiple tracks of perception. “The more neural ‘tracks’ you activate throughout the brain (through words, images, intonation, music—all of which activate different neural circuits), the more evocative and memorable your message will be,” writes neuroscientist Drew Westen.6 The FrameWorks approach also modifies findings from the cognitive sciences that suggest ideas and issues come in hierarchies.7 These hierarchies reflect the fact that people reason from the general to the specific, with each successive level in the hierarchy acting to prime thinking for each lower level.8 Three levels of hierarchy have been identified. Level one is represented by big new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd

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ideas or values such as fairness, individualism, opportunity, prevention, and the like. Level two refers to categories of issues, or what we refer to as issue domains, such as health, education, environment, and youth issues. Level three captures specific policies, programs, or activities within the issue domains. The Earned Income Tax Credit, day care, minimum wage, and school choice are examples of items contained in level three. Our current concern is at level two. The basic issue is that many policy experts and advocates do not understand that each category of issues, or issue domain, comes replete with entailments of public perception that have consequences for frame effects. Put differently, issue domains have acquired habits of thinking about those issues that develop over time and are domain specific. These habits of thinking have consequences for how the public understands the contours of a different issue now defined as a parcel of an existing issue domain. For instance, if a particular policy is attached to an issue domain that is widely perceived to be private in nature, the result of individual behavior and choices, its ability to inspire public solutions will be greatly impaired.9 Our concern is that issue advocates often communicate across level two domains with little knowledge of the likely frame effects associated with each domain. The goal of this article is to detail the entailments of level two domains frequently used by child advocates and specify the frame effects on policy preferences. This discussion ultimately points to how and why these choices are strategic, and it underscores the contribution that research can make in evaluating choices among competing strategies. It is this empiricism that our approach advances.

Level two considerations in the framing of child development There are at least four level two domains within which to align the constellation of policy outcomes that child advocates wish to promote: new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd

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• Workforce, emphasizing that availability of child care impairs or facilitates women’s workforce participation • Education, emphasizing that what happens early in a child’s life affects lifelong learning • Health, emphasizing that what happens early in a child’s life affects lifelong health • Development, emphasizing that what happens early in a child’s life determines the foundation for all future progress In reality, all four choices are valid, with extensive developmental research supporting each assertion.10 But framing theory would predict that each choice will have different entailments in public thinking associated with the way the public has come to think about workforce, education, health, and development. Given this, how should advocates evaluate the merits of these frame choices in advancing public thinking about policies that support development? Drawing from a decade of FrameWorks’ research on child and family policies and the frames that advance support, we use qualitative and quantitative methods associated with our practice to demonstrate how science-based communications is essential to the documentation of frame effects associated with each of these domain-level choices. As early as 1998, children’s advocates and framing scholars began to question the advisability of framing early child policies as workforce issues, a domain decision that positions child care as closely tied to women’s workforce participation.11 This frame practice had been widely used as part of the welfare-to-work debate for poor women and for middle-class women as a way to engage policymakers in recognizing the new realities of the American workforce. Linguist George Lakoff concluded that “the term ‘day care’ for most people elicits the child storage frame, in which a mother who wants a career needs a safe, convenient, and affordable place to leave her child for the day.” Lakoff advised that such a frame choice would have the effect of obscuring considerations of quality in the provision of care. “If children are viewed as precious objects of a fixed nature, then simply storing them safely is a reasonable goal new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd

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for a day care center. On the other hand, if children are seen as being malleable objects—as having their minds crucially shaped in a permanent way by their earliest experiences—then the requirements for day care are much more than mere storage,” Lakoff wrote in an influential foundation publication broadly distributed to the child advocacy community.12 In the end, Lakoff advised that early education be substituted for day care or child care and that concepts familiar to the education domain—“basics,” “foundation for learning,” “ready to learn”—be borrowed and adapted to younger children. It is important to recognize that Lakoff’s recommendations essentially bundled early child development within the education frame; that is, early education in Lakoff’s version includes development even as it aligns itself with the language of observable, cognitive learning. But in the end, Lakoff’s recommendations will serve to elevate a wide array of child policies only if ordinary Americans harbor a broad construct for education that includes social and emotional skills. That is, the success of the strategy rests on whether, when early child policies become aligned with education, this category allows the incorporation of a broader view of what constitutes early learning, including social, emotional, and regulatory skills. This is precisely the kind of question that we suggest framing research pursue. FrameWorks’ research began with investigating an education frame as applied to early childhood issues. As issues advocates moved toward the incorporation of early childhood policies within an education frame—borrowing the language of education to explain concepts in terms of early learning, pre-K, preschool expulsions, or school readiness, for example—we set out to discover how such a frame choice affected public thinking. We were interested in the constraints imposed by the domain choice: whether people could readily conceptualize early child policies and programs as education and whether policies beyond observable, cognitive learning could be advanced through this domain. In-depth, open-ended interviews were conducted with forty-nine informants in New England (Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Rhode new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd

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Island) and southern California by two FrameWorks Institute researchers in June and July 2008.13 In line with the cognitive interview methodology commonly applied in psychological anthropology,14 interviews were designed to elicit ways of thinking and talking about topics related to education or to examine the cultural models informants use to make sense of and understand an issue. FrameWorks researchers concluded that for most Americans, preschool and other venues for early child learning are not easily viewed as “education.” Rather than broadening their notions of education to accommodate more social and emotional skills, people rejected the notion that what goes on in child care centers and preschools is education: Informants emphasized the value of preschool in helping children learn to get along with others and interact with non-parental authority figures. However, there was little discussion of the importance of other skills or developments that specialists believe preschool is integral in facilitating. Furthermore, many informants saw the social skills conferred through preschool attendance as being “natural” or automatic and not necessarily requiring preschool enrollment. These beliefs lead many to see preschool as relatively superfluous and several informants went so far as to refer to preschool as “just babysitting.”15

Whether there is any advantage to the framing of early child policies within the education domain, as opposed to the workforce domain, is raised in these comments from an informant: I couldn’t evaluate like the learning part because I think it’s so minimal. I mean a lot of it is finger painting and that kind of stuff. I think that’s more the socialization. Preschool probably has more influence in that way than—I don’t think they really teach any reading at all. I mean—or maybe they do but they, you know, it—it’s the uh . . . you know, the kids are read to. They learn how to sit still. I think a lot of it is socialization. I think—I would imagine preschool is like that or maybe—I think parents are probably not demanding a big educational aspect to preschool. They’re really looking for, um, you know, “I need my kids at a safe place where they’re going to be, you know, they get to socialize and they have uh . . . responsible adults looking after them.” And again, a lot of preschool is supposed new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd

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to be really a lot of fun too. You know, kids dance around and they do all sorts of stuff. I don’t know that it’s educational really.16

In group discussions, we found further evidence of the ill fit between education and very young children. In fact, it produced a backlash, as many well-intentioned parents and citizens questioned whether children were being rushed into pedagogical situations beyond their capability. This relatively common concern for what David Elkind has named “the hurried child” raises a caution about the perverse effects of the education frame in that it demonstrates how people who are sensitive to developmental issues can be alienated by the perceived limitations of the education frame.17 Here are two different discussants in focus groups conducted in seven states in 2001–2002: They seem to push kids into education a little too fast sometimes and they don’t allow them to be kids and play. I mean people are getting their kids into preschool at three years old . . . You see a lot of people that want to teach their kids like you said multiple languages before they are five and teach them to read before they get to kindergarten. A lot of these kids don’t have social skills because they haven’t been allowed to interact with other kids. Are we trying to get them there too early? Eventually that child is going to be potty trained and . . . that child is going to read and write, and are we trying to push a two year old to be ready to read and write?18

In addition to the ill fit between very young children and the education domain documented here is the issue of what entailments come with the alignment of early child policies with education. Put another way, what habits of thinking come automatically to mind when people think about education and apply this thinking to young children? In this respect, education serves as a frame cue— but what does it evoke? FrameWorks’ researchers found education associations to be highly individualistic and associated with individual achievement. When reasoning along these lines about very young children, this frame choice represents a double-whammy. If early experiences in new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd

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day care and pre-K are not real education and education is about preparing individuals for later achievement, then pre-K is not necessary to later achievement. If early experiences are about developing social skills that come naturally, then pre-K is not necessary to later skills development. There are few alternative directions for reasoning to pursue once this frame trap is set. Moreover, FrameWorks researchers observed that parents were perceived to be primarily, if not solely, responsible for children’s outcomes. “According to informants, it was clear that parents and families, not schools are to blame for educational failures.”19 In effect, the framing of early child issues as education did little to overcome the problem FrameWorks has described as “the family bubble,” defined as the assumption that solely parents are responsible for children’s development and that anything that happens “outside” the family is relatively invisible or deemed less important. Finally, as one might assume, to the degree that education reminds people that parents and students are responsible for educational outcomes, it does little to move child policies out of the realm of the private and onto the public agenda. In future FrameWorks quantitative work, we will be using experimental surveys to test specifically the degree to which framing early child policies as education enhances or diminishes support for public remedies; the qualitative evidence suggests that publicness remains a challenge to this framing strategy. A second test of this strategy should be the extent to which it is able to lift multiple policies, from support for child and family mental health programs to antipoverty interventions. Put another way, if education as domain serves only narrowly to lift education policies and does little to elevate support for programs that address social and emotional aspects of learning, then early child advocates are left to compete with themselves, inventing new frames for each set of policies. Such is the fate of the next frame strategy that child advocates have considered: framing child policies in terms of their impact on long-term health. In conversations with public health advocates, health-oriented philanthropies, and developmental scientists, FrameWorks saw increasing interest in the power of explaining new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd

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early child adversity in terms of its long-term health effects. It was widely assumed that this framing strategy would have far more power than explaining effects on the brain or effects on learning. The very concreteness of health effects was seen as potentially simpler to explain than the more seemingly complex and abstract domain of development. There was good reason to be hopeful about this strategy. To some degree, it responds directly to a key challenge in public thinking by making early child outcomes explicitly physical or material. In research conducted originally on early child development and later extended to other issue areas, FrameWorks has become sensitive to the distinction between mentalist and materialist thinking. Mentalist explanations focus on individual motivation, morals, and internal self-control as the determinants of differential outcomes; reasoning in this way, people struggle to understand how the availability of services that protect women from domestic abuse can be as important as the woman’s volition to leave her abusive partner. Materialist explanations focus on the way that choices are structured by the places and policies that constrain, if not predetermine, outcomes, regardless of individual preference or striving. Thus, one important question for this frame strategy is whether, by explicitly lodging child outcomes in the body, it can overcome the attribution of responsibility at the individual level. In 2008, as part of a larger national experimental study on framing early child development, FrameWorks investigated the extent to which exposure to the domain of health—a statement about the fact that early experiences affect lifelong health—influenced support for a range of child-related policies.20 This experimental study had two distinct advantages. First, it relied on a novel online method that allowed random probability sampling, thus overcoming the problems associated with Internet-generated samples. Second, the sample was massive by experimental standards (forty-two hundred participants), thus allowing us to overcome problems typically associated with convenience samples of college sophomores. The design of this study is straightforward. Study participants were randomly assigned into a treatment group and a control new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd

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group. The treatment group read a paragraph that foregrounded information about the effects of early experiences on long-term health. The control group received no such paragraph. All study participants were subsequently asked an array of questions related to child policy. The research question was whether exposure to the child health frame could lift support for policies in and outside the domain of health. Following is an example of the health frame to which the treatment group was exposed: Lately there has been a lot of talk about the role of society in supporting children. In particular, people have offered various explanations of why it is important to devote societal resources to children at the very earliest stages of life. For example, some people believe that adverse experiences get built into the child’s body early in life and can predispose a child to later illness. According to this view, children exposed to early adversity can develop an exaggerated stress response that, over time, weakens their defense system against diseases, from heart disease to diabetes and depression. That exaggerated response may never go away, with lifelong consequences. Have you heard of this explanation of why we should allocate societal resources to preventing long-term health problems in young children?

The findings clearly demonstrated that exposure to the child health frame increased support for a range of health-related policies, including providing health care for all pregnant women and women in child-bearing years and providing services such as wellchild visits, oral health care, neonatal screening and follow-up, and vision and hearing screening. However, exposure to the child health frame did not raise support for early child care policies, low-income family programs, children’s mental health programs, or for antichild abuse and neglect policies. We speculated that the negative results of the child health frame—the finding that exposure depressed support for the full range of child-related policy preferences—was the result of the entanglements associated with lodging the concept of development within the broader health issue domain. To test this hypothesis, we relied on a considerable body of prior research conducted by new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd

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FrameWorks on translating the science of early child development into a core story of science principles that can be easily grasped by ordinary Americans.21 To simplify the contrast between effects of framing child policies as health versus framing them as development, we selected a core developmental principle—the disruptive effects of toxic stress on development—and compared its effects on the array of child policies referenced above. The execution of the development frame was as follows: Lately there has been a lot of talk about the role of society in supporting children. In particular, people have offered various explanations of why it is important to devote societal resources to children at the very earliest stages of life. For example, some people believe that “toxic stress” in early childhood is associated with such things as extreme poverty, abuse, or severe maternal depression and damages the developing brain. It is important to distinguish among three kinds of stress. We do not need to worry about positive stress (which is short-lived stress, like getting immunized). But toxic stress lasts longer, lacks consistent supportive relationships and leads to lifelong problems in learning, behavior, and both physical and mental health. Please tell us if you have heard this explanation of why we should allocate societal assets to young children.

The development frame had a statistically significant effect on three out of five policy batteries.22 In short, exposure to the development frame resulted in an increase of support across a broad range of policy issues. In sum, although there has been an evolution in frame strategies—from early child policies as workforce facilitator to education to health to development—there has been little scrutiny or discussion of the basis for these changes or for the reasons they succeed or fail. Strategy requires scrutiny. As Martin Luther King Jr. wrote, “There is no tactical theory so neat that a revolutionary struggle for a share of power can be won merely by pressing a row of buttons. Human beings with all their faults and strengths constitute the mechanism of a social movement. They must make mistakes and learn from them, make more mistakes and learn anew. They new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd

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must taste defeat as well as success, and discover how to live with each other. Time and action are teachers. When we planned our strategy for Birmingham, we spent many hours assessing Albany and trying to learn from its errors.”23 If child advocates and policy experts are to use their time and communications wisely, more systematic scrutiny of frame choices needs to become the norm. The choice of issue domains needs to be respected as an important tactical decision in an overall frame strategy. The choice of issue domains needs to be understood as having consequences beyond the ability to secure news coverage. Such frame choices need to be carefully scrutinized to reveal the cognitive baggage that comes with each domain and can easily undermine other benefits of the affiliation.

Implications for youth development practitioners Domain effects, we maintain, can be documented across the developmental span. That is, the broader question of youth development, as opposed to early childhood development, can be framed as pertaining to different domains. For example, youth development can be framed as workforce (Will they work or be on welfare?), education (Will they drop out or graduate from college?), health (Will they avoid AIDS and teen parenting?), crime (Will they avoid the afterschool prime time for crime?), or development (Will they become decent, contributing members of their communities?). In each case, entailments of the category come with the frame choice. As we have shown in other research,24 we believe there is substantial evidence that development is a better frame choice than the other categories. Our confidence stems from earlier FrameWorks research that explored the effects of domain choices on public support for youth development programs and policies.25 In a series of eight focus groups, we exposed adult Minnesotans to a number of different domain-specific ways of thinking about youth development new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd

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in general, and after-school programs in specific, and analyzed the resulting discourse. Each group was given a paragraph that described youth development in terms of economic or workforce development, crime prevention, and adolescent brain architecture (among others). The economic argument had the effect of focusing discussants narrowly on the quality of in-school education and limiting their ability to consider extracurricular and more experiential aspects of youth development. In essence, it promoted education to the exclusion of other policies and programs. The crime prevention argument suggested “no value to youth programs other than filling time until parents return from work. This provides focus group participants with a welcome cue to blame parents for troubled kids. If dual-income families were less materialistic, focus group participants suggest, parents would sacrifice to keep one parent home with the children. This frame heightens the priority of youth programs among many focus group participants. However, it reinforces damaging perceptions of teens and communicates a very narrow image of youth development programs.”26 The effects from exposure to these two frames stand in sharp contrast to the discussion that ensued as a result of the development frame. FrameWorks researchers concluded, “This frame provides focus group participants with a new understanding of adolescent development and creates increased sensitivity to adolescent experiences. This leads to a broad range of objectives for youth programs—building self-esteem, providing guidance, offering a training ground, etc. It also causes focus group participants to rethink the way education and juvenile justice should operate. Importantly, this frame appears to provide a role for the community without threatening parental control and responsibility.”27 We believe there is substantial evidence that framing both early child and adolescent policies in terms of development is preferable to any of the alternatives (workforce, crime, education, health) offered to date. Counter to popular wisdom, development properly explained tends to open people up to a wide array of child policies new directions for youth development • DOI: 10.1002/yd

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and programs and tends to avoid the narrow effects, both positive and negative, of these other domain options. We end on a cautionary note. While level two effects are substantial, this element of the frame will not be able to redirect public thinking alone. Fully developed frames require the proper orchestration of other frame elements, such as Values and Messengers, to robustly evoke new stories about what is at stake, who is responsible, and which solutions are likely to be most effective. In short, we contend that the youth development field should take seriously the pursuit of strategic framing as a rigorous process of inquiry. As the other articles in this volume attest, strategic communications can play a profound role in how people understand social issues, and, more important, they can have a measurable impact on the widespread adoption of particular policies and practices thought to be in the best interest of the developing child. Notes 1. Throughout this article, we will define domains as issue categories such as Environment, Health, and Education. We intend to distinguish these categories from specific policies or programs such as after-school or preschool programs, child immunization, and Head Start. 2. Earlier taxonomies of frames have been suggested: Ryan, C. (1991). Prime time activism. Boston: South End Press. Winett, L. (1997). Advocate’s guide to framing memos. In S. Iyengar & R. Reeves (Eds.), Do the media govern? Politicians, voters, and reporters in America. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. 3. R. M. Williams, quoted in Rokeach, M. (1973). The nature of human values and values systems. New York: Macmillan. P. 19. 4. On messengers, see Lupia, A., & McCubbins, M. (1998). The democratic dilemma: Can citizens learn what they need to know? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. On visuals, see Iyengar, S., with Gilliam, F., Simon, A., & Wright, O. (1996). Crime in black and white: The violent, scary world of local news. Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics, 1, 6–23. On metaphors, see Gentner, D., & Stevens, A. (1983). Mental models. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. On values, see Rokeach. (1973). On tone, see Brader, T. (2006). Campaigning for hearts and minds: How emotional appeals in political ads work. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 5. See www.frameworksinstitute.org/allissues.html for an array of studies that document the impacts of frame elements on policy preferences. See also McAllister, A. (2007). Frame effects of global warming messages in Canada: Findings from the experimental research. Washington, DC: FrameWorks Institute;


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Manuel, T. (2009). Refining the core story of early childhood development: The effects of science and health frames. Washington, DC: FrameWorks Institute. 6. Westen, D. (2007). The political brain: The role of emotion in deciding the fate of the nation. New York: Perseus Books. P. 273. 7. Levels of frames have been enumerated in FrameWorks’ own explanations of frames since 2002: Framing public issues. Washington, DC: FrameWorks Institute. Other scholars who discuss levels of thinking include Schön, D., & Rein, M. (1994). Frame reflection: Toward the resolution of intractable policy controversies. New York: Basic Books; Lakoff, G. (2006). Simple framing. Berkeley, CA: Rockridge Institute. 8. See Schallert, D. L. (1982). The significance of knowledge: A synthesis of research related to schema theory. In W. Otto & S. White (Eds.), Reading expository material. New York: Academic Press. 9. For an example, see Aubrun, A., Brown, A., & Grady, J. (2006). Health individualism: Findings from the cognitive elicitations among Californians. Washington, DC: FrameWorks Institute. 10. For more on the science behind these claims, see National Scientific Council on the Developing Child. (2007). The science of early childhood development. http://www.developingchild.net and other working papers posted at this site. 11. Benton Foundation. (1998, Summer). Effective language for discussing early childhood education and policy. Washington, DC: Benton Foundation. 12. Benton Foundation. (1998). 13. Kendall-Taylor, N., & Chart, H. (2008). Reform what? Individualist thinking in education: American cultural models on schooling. Washington, DC: FrameWorks Institute. 14. See D’Andrade, R., & Strauss, C. (1992). Human motives and cultural models. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Also Quinn, N. (Ed). (2005). Finding culture in talk. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 15. Kendall-Taylor & Chart. (2008). 16. Kendall-Taylor & Chart. (2008). 17. Elkind, D. (1988). The hurried child: Growing up too fast too soon. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. 18. Bales, S. N. (2005). Talking early child development and explaining the consequences of frame choices. Washington, DC: FrameWorks Institute. 19. Kendall-Taylor & Chart. (2008). 20. Manuel. (2009). 21. National Scientific Council on the Developing Child. (2007). 22. Manuel. (2009). Also note that earlier experimental surveys had strongly suggested the robust effects of the developmental frame; see Gilliam, Jr., F. D. (2007). Telling the science story: An exploration of frame effects on public understanding and support for early child development. Washington, DC: FrameWorks Institute. 23. King, M. L. (2000). Why we can’t wait. New York: Signet Classic. 24. Bales, S. N. (2001). Reframing youth issues for public consideration and support. Washington, DC: FrameWorks Institute.


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25. See Bales, S. N. (2005). Making the case for youth programs: The Minnesota research. Washington, DC: FrameWorks Institute. 26. Bostrom, M. (2004). A developmental perspective: An analysis of qualitative research exploring views of youth programs. Washington, DC: FrameWorks Institute. 27. Bostrom, M. (2004).

susan nall bales is president and founder of the nonprofit FrameWorks Institute and a visiting scientist in the Department of Society, Human Development, and Health at the Harvard School of Public Health. franklin d. gilliam jr. is a senior fellow with the FrameWorks Institute and dean of the School of Public Affairs at UCLA.


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Index A. L. Mailman Foundation, 5 Achievement gap: individualist thinking about inequality and, 45; media’s racial disparities frame of, 40, 43–45; SES, vocabulary growth, and, 42–43 Affirmative action policies, 47 American public opinion: cognitive interviews on, 33; cultural models interviews on child development, 55; media content analysis on, 16–17, 18–20, 32–33; media framing of, 16–17, 18–20, 32–33, 39–48; peer discourse analysis of, 33, 58, 63–68; Watch Your Mouth campaign’s impact on, 99–101. See also Civic engagement; Lay-expert gaps; Public policies American society: declining civic engagement in, 29–30; erosion of social capital in, 30 Annie E. Casey Foundation, 3, 5, 91, 94, 95 Baby Einstein DVDs, 46 Bales, S. N., 2, 4, 7, 12, 13, 27, 119, 134 Barr Foundation, 104 Benjamin, D., 3, 10, 88, 91, 95 Better Baby Institute, 45–46 Blake, W., 22 “Blueprint for the Success of Children in Tennessee” report (2006), 93 Boston Globe Magazine, 45 “Broken Community Support System Illustrated by 2007 Child Homicides” (N.C. Child Fatality Prevention Team), 108 California Civil Rights Initiative (1996), 47 California Endowment, 21–22

Center on the Developing Child (Harvard University), 78 Chevron, 19–20 Child advocacy: of children’s oral health, 4, 88–89, 97–101; framing child policies in terms of long-term health, 126–129; incorporating strategic message framing into, 94; Kids Count Network approach to, 3, 93–95; Strategic Framing Study Circles workshop on communicating, 4, 87, 103–110. See also Social change Child development: Americans’ view on parents as primary factor in, 52–53; “boosting” infant’s brainpower to ensure, 46; competitive race frame of, 40, 45–47; cultural models interviews revealing American thinking on, 55; domain decisions to increase frame coherence of, 119–132; preschool issue of, 56; SES differences, vocabulary growth, and, 42–43. See also ECD (early child development); Youth development Children’s oral health: increasing public’s understanding of, 97–98; Watch Your Mouth campaign to improve, 4, 88–89 Civic engagement: declining American society, 29–30; research how to increase, 30–31; Strategic Frame Analysis alignment with, 14. See also American public opinion; Social problems Cognitive interviews, 33 Coleman, J., 30 Communication: as collective social action tool, 85; comparing commercial and social movements, 85–86; Curt McPhail on a funder’s

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perspective of strategic, 111–118; FrameWork’s social change pedagogy of, 85–89; Kirkpatrick’s evaluation of social change pedagogy of, 87, 88–89; Strategic Framing Study Circles workshop on child advocacy, 4, 87, 103–117 Communication research: field building strategies for, 83–84; FrameWorks’ cultural approach to, 52–58; peer discourse sessions applications in, 65–68; simplifying models of, 35–36, 54–58. See also Strategic Frame Analysis (SFA) Community capacity: FrameWorks Institute’s mission to build, 83; Kids Count Network’s impact on, 95; research and practice partnership to increase, 83–89 Crary, D., 91 Cultural models: description of, 53; FrameWorks approach to identifying, 51; interviews conducted using, 54–55; peer discourse session use of, 63–64; referentially transparent definition of, 53–54; and simplifying models employed for expert-lay understanding, 54–58 Culture: consumerism and, 19; description of, 53; media’s “sociological propaganda” impact on, 19–20; predisposition toward individual explanations for problems, 20–22 Davey, L., 2, 3, 5, 7, 10, 29, 38, 83, 90 David and Lucile Packard Foundation, 5 DentaQuest Foundation, 5 Domain choices: comparing childhood workforce and education, 124–125; education, 124–126; FrameWorks’ framing approach using, 123–130; implications for youth development practitioners, 130–132; level two considerations for framing child development, 121–130; longterm child health, 126–129; three levels of hierarchies and, 120–121; workforce, 122–125, 130 Driver, D., 41–42

ECD (early child development): experimental research on frame effects of, 78–81t; frame coherence by aligning specific domains with, 119–132. See also Child development Education frame: comparing workforce and, 124–125; consequences of the, 125–126; “the hurried child” issue of, 125 Educational arms race frame, 46–47 Elkind, D., 46, 125 Ellul, J., 19 Endowment for Health New Hampshire, 5 Environment-childhood development frame, 80 Experimental research: benefits in evaluating frame effects using, 76–77; challenges of using Web-based instruments for, 77–78e; description of, 76; on early childhood development frame effects, 78–81; frame effects illuminated using, 73–76; schematic design for, 74fig Expert-lay gaps. See Lay-expert gaps Family bubble frame, 40, 41–43, 126 Feinberg, J., 4, 11, 12, 87, 103, 110, 111–118 Fiorina, M., 29 Flacks, R., 30 Focus groups: comparing peer discourse analysis and, 64–66; description and function of, 61–62; political communications application of, 62–63. See also Peer discourse analysis Frame coherence: domain choice to increase, 121–132; FrameWorks Institute’s approach to, 119–120; implications of domain choice for practitioners, 130–132 Frame effects: benefits of experimental research for evaluating, 76–77; example of, 78e; experimental research on early childhood development, 78–81t; how social experiments illuminate, 73–76; understanding, 15

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INDEX

Frames: of child public policies as workforce issues, 122–123, 130; comparing childhood workforce and education domain, 124–125; disparities and achievement gaps, 40, 43–45; domain decisions for child development, 119–132; early childhood development and environment, 80; early childhood development prosperity, 79–80; educational arms race, 46–47; family bubble, 40, 41–43, 126; long-term child health, 126–129; vulnerable child/fairness, 80; youth development as competitive race, 40, 45–47. See also Framing FrameWorks Institute: on barriers to complex social problem explanations, 22–25; building communications capacity mission of, 83; cultural models approach used by, 52–58; using experimental research supporting strategic framing, 71–81; focus groups used by, 62; framing child development by aligning specific domains approach of, 119–132; framing study interests of, 2, 5; on increasing social problem civic engagement, 30–31; Kids Count Network of, 3, 91–95; laboratory frames manipulations by, 15–16; media content analyses of social issues by, 14, 15, 17–18, 32–33; Strategic Framing Study Circles workshops by, 4, 87, 103–110; Watch Your Mouth campaign of, 4, 88–89, 97–101. See also Strategic Framing Study Circles Framing: “graveyard of hypotheses,” 23; intentional, 1–2, 32–37; parental responsibility, 1; predisposition toward individual explanations, 20–22; understanding Americans’ approach to, 2; as value neutral process, 14. See also Frames; Strategic Frame Analysis (SFA)

Hart, B., 43 Harvard Center on the Developing Child, 5 Harvard University, 78 Head Start, 46 Hughes, D., 42 “The hurried child” issue, 125

Gilliam, F. D., Jr., 4, 12, 117, 119, 134 Gordon, D., 42

McKnight Foundation, 5 McPhail, C., 4, 12, 111–118

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Intentional framing: to close experts-lay understanding gap, 34–35; description of, 1–2; Strategic Frame Analysis as, 32–37 Interviews: American public opinion analysis using cognitive, 33; cultural models, 54–55; by Jane Feinberg of Curt McPhail, 112–118; mapping gap expert-lay understanding of issues, 34; peer discourse sessions form of, 33, 63–68 Iyengar, S., 17, 18, 44 Kamara, A., 42 Kamara, M., 42 Kendall-Taylor, N., 3, 8, 9, 23, 35, 51, 59, 61, 63, 69, 93 Kids Count Network: description of, 3; examples of strategic framing applications by, 93–95; Strategic Frame Analysis incorporated into, 91–93 King, M. L., Jr., 129 Kirkpatric’s evaluation: four steps of, 87; of social change by students, 88–89 Lakoff, G., 122–123 Lay-expert gaps: description of, 55; intentional framing to close, 34–35; mapping the, 34; preschool issue as example of, 56; simplifying models to close the, 54–58; Strategic Frame Analysis assumption on, 34–36, 54. See also American public opinion; Public policies; Social problems Lippmann, W., 13, 16 Long-term child health frame, 126–129 Lumina Foundation for Education, 5

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Manuel, T., 2, 3, 7, 9, 23, 29, 38, 61, 69, 71, 82, 93 Mary Black Foundation, 4, 5, 111, 114, 118 Massachusetts Expanded Learning Time Initiative annual report (2006–2007): improved cover of, 108fig; original cover of, 106, 107fig Massachusetts Oral Health Advocacy Taskforce, 101 Massachusetts Strategic Framing Study Circle, 104–105 Media: framing of youth social problems by, 40–47, 79–80; negative and improved press releases to, 106–109; Strategic Framing Study Circle impact on management of, 105–107 Media content: American opinion about youth and, 16–17, 18–20, 32–33, 39–48; disparities as achievement gaps frame, 40, 43–45; family bubble frame, 40, 41–43, 126; “sociological propaganda” of, 19–20; youth development as competitive race, 40, 45–47 Media content analysis: on American opinions, 16–17, 18–20, 32–33; FrameWorks Institute’s approach to, 14, 15, 17–18, 32–33, 40–48; traditional quantitative methods in, 39–40 Mills, C. W., 17 Minnesota Department of Education, 5 Minnesota Department of Human Services, 5 Mississippi Kids Count, 94 Mississippi State University, 94 Munroe, R. L., 5

National Forum on Early Childhood Program Evaluation, 78 National Scientific Council on the Developing Child, 78 N.C. Child Fatality Prevention Team: improved press release by, 108–109; negative press release by, 106–107 Nellie Mae Education Foundation, 5

“New 2007 Child Homicide Numbers Illustrate Need for Greater Family Support” (N.C. Child Fatality Prevention Team), 106–107 No Child Left Behind Act, 44 North Carolina Strategic Framing Study Circle, 105–109 O’Neil, M., 2, 8, 32, 39, 49, 52, 93 “Opportunity for All Children in Tennessee” report, 93 Oral Health Advocacy Taskforce (Massachusetts), 101 Oral health. See Children’s oral health Parents: assumption on child development and role of, 52–53; family bubble frame on role of, 40, 41–43, 126; parental responsibility framing, 1 Peer discourse analysis: comparing focus groups to, 64–66; cultural models and traveling power in, 63–64; description and purpose of, 33; language, meaning, and negotiation aspects of, 64–66; patterns of discourse during, 65; simplifying models for testing, 58; structure and conducting sessions of, 67–68. See also Focus groups Pitzer College, 5 Preschool issue, 56 Proposition 209 (California), 47 Prosperity-child development frame, 79–80 Public policies: affirmative action, 47; disparities and achievement gaps frame of, 40, 43–45; early childhood development and environment frame of, 80; family bubble frame of, 40, 41–43, 126; frame effects and, 15, 73–81t; framing child policies in terms of long-term health, 126–129; questioning workforce issue framing of child, 122–123; youth development as competitive race frame of, 40, 45–47. See also American public opinion; Lay-expert gaps Putnam, R., 30

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Quinn, N., 53, 55 Racial disparities-achievement gap frame, 40, 43–45 Random digit dial (RDD) sampling frame, 73–74 Risley, T., 43 SAT scores, 44 Schema theory, 13–14 Schudson, M., 19 Shonkoff, J., 112 Simplifying models: closing lay-expert gaps using, 54–58; description of, 35; designing and selecting effective, 35–36 Skocpol, T., 29 Social change: FrameWorks Institute’s communication pedagogy for, 85–89; Kirkpatrick’s evaluation of FrameWork’s pedagogy, 87, 88–89. See also Child advocacy Social problems: barriers to complex explanations for, 22–25; children’s oral health, 4, 88–89, 97–101; framing child development by aligning specific domains of, 119–132; increasing civic engagement in solving, 30–31; media content analysis on American opinion on, 16–17, 18–20, 32–33; media framing and American opinion on, 39–48; media’s “sociological propaganda” on, 19–20; Mill’s distinction between two views of, 17; predisposition toward individual explanations for, 20–22; rebalancing individual and collective explanations, 24–25; reframing the blame for, 36–37. See also Civic engagement; Lay-expert gaps Social Science Research Center (Mississippi State University), 94 South Carolina Strategic Framing Study Circle, 114–115 Southward, L., 94 Sputnik, 46 Strategic Frame Analysis phases: I: exploring public understanding, 32–33; II: mapping expert-lay

139

understanding gap, 34; III: intentional framing to close gap of understanding, 34–36; IV: reframing the blame, 36–37; VI: handingoff research findings, 37 Strategic Frame Analysis (SFA): as both empirical inquiry and practice, 84–85; civic engagement goal alignment with, 14; description of, 2, 31; development of the, 72; a funder’s perspective on, 111–118; Kids Count Network incorporation of, 91–95; rebalancing individual and collective explanations, 24–25; reframing and phases of, 32–37. See also Communication research; Framing Strategic Framing Study Circles: continuing challenges related to, 109–110; description of, 4, 103–104; future of Study Circle 2.0, 116–117; improved media relations impact of, 105–109; Mary Black Foundation’s funding of South Carolina, 114–115; Massachusetts experience with, 104–105; North Carolina experience with, 105–109; technical assistance core curriculum of, 87. See also FrameWorks Institute Study Circle 2.0, 116–117 Taylor, N. K., 51, 59 Tennessee Commission on Children and Youth, 93 Tennessee Kids Count, 93 Tufts University, 46 University of California at Berkeley, 47 University of California at Los Angeles, 47 University of Minnesota, 5 U.S. Surgeon General, 97 Vaughan, K., 3–4, 11, 88, 97, 102 Vulnerable child/fairness frame, 80 Watch Your Mouth campaign: description of, 4; developing the, 98–99;

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purpose of, 99–100; quantifying community impact of, 88–89; results of the, 100–101 Web-based instruments: examples of testing frame effects using, 78e; experimental research challenges of using, 77 Westen, D., 120 What to Expect When You’re Expecting, 46 W.K. Kellogg Foundation, 5 Workforce frame: comparing education and, 124–125; traditional approach of, 122–123, 130 W.T. Grant Foundation, 5

Youth development: identifying cultural models for understanding, 51–58; media’s competitive race frame of, 40, 45–47. See also child development Youth issues: FrameWorks Institute’s analysis of media content on, 14, 15, 17–18; identifying cultural models for understanding, 51–58; media content and American opinion about, 16–17, 18–20, 39; oral health, 4, 88–89, 97–101; shaping influences on, 21–22; three most dominant media frames on, 40–47

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Notes for Contributors After reading this issue, you might be interested to become a contributor. New Directions for Youth Development: Theory, Practice, and Research is a peer-reviewed quarterly publication focusing on contemporary issues inspiring and challenging the field of youth development. A defining focus of the journal is the relationship among theory, research, and practice. In particular, NDYD is dedicated to recognizing resilience as well as risk, and healthy development of our youth as well as the difficulties of adolescence. The journal is also interested in applications of youth development to education and schools, and is a leading voice in afterschool and out-of-school time scholarship. The journal is intended as a forum for provocative discussion that reaches across the worlds of academia, service, philanthropy, and policy. In the tradition of the New Directions series, each volume of the journal addresses a single, timely topic, although special issues covering a variety of topics are occasionally commissioned. We welcome submissions of both volume topics and individual articles. All articles should address the implications of theory for practice and research directions, and how these arenas can better inform one another. Articles may focus on any aspect of youth development; all theoretical and methodological orientations are welcome. If you would like to be an issue editor, please submit an outline of no more than four pages that includes a brief description of your proposed topic and its significance along with a brief synopsis of individual articles (including tentative authors and a working title for each chapter). If you would like to be an author, please submit first an abstract of no more than 1,500 words. Send this to the editorial manager.

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For all prospective issue editors or authors: • Please make sure to keep accessibility in mind, by illustrating theoretical ideas with specific examples and explaining technical terms in nontechnical language. A busy practitioner who may not have an extensive research background should be well served by our work. • Please keep in mind that references should be limited to twenty-five to thirty. Authors should make use of case examples to illustrate their ideas, rather than citing exhaustive research references. You may want to recommend two or three key articles, books, or Web sites that are influential in the field, to be featured on a resource page. This can be used by readers who want to delve more deeply into a particular topic. • All reference information should be listed as endnotes, rather than including author names in the body of the article or footnotes at the bottom of the page. The endnotes are in APA style. Please visit http://www.pearweb.org for more information. Gil G. Noam Editor-in-Chief

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