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Communicative Framing Analysis

Communicative framing analysis is a procedure that allows researchers to study the framing patterns of multiple stakeholders across different research sites. Following particularly Erving Goffman's work, communicative framing refers to the ways in which stakeholders define what is going on in a given situation by foregrounding specific aspects during their interactions. The procedure was first developed to examine framing within and across a series of intractable environmental conflicts. It allows both a fine-grained analysis of different kinds of framing within a particular case as well as the investigation of dominant framing patterns across several cases.

Conceptual Overview and Discussion

There are several reasons for using communicative framing analysis. First, it is a mixed methods approach that enables researchers to build a more holistic picture of the phenomenon under investigation. Employing mixed methods ensures that the results are not methodological artifacts and allows researchers to compensate for the weaknesses of one method with the strengths of another. Second, it is especially useful when comparatively little research has been conducted on the phenomenon of study. Third, following Allen Lee's notion of multilevel interpretations, it provides a means for developing first-, second-, and third-level interpretations of stakeholders' framing patterns within and across different cases, and thus enables comparative case analysis.

The procedure starts with the conduct of qualitative interviews designed to capture first-level interpretations of the phenomenon under study by the research participants themselves. Next, Barney Glaser and Anselm Strauss's “constant comparative method” of grounded data analysis is employed to develop a set of framing categories that apply within and across the different cases. Standardized frequency counts of these framing categories are then computed for each of the stakeholders based on a quantitative content analysis of their interviews. These counts are subsequently used to conduct a cluster analysis. This analysis enables a third-level interpretation of the ways stakeholders group together across the cases based on their framing similarities. Using this quantitative method increases the study's reliability and validity. Finally, the constant comparative analysis of the interviews is used again to gain more insight into the ways stakeholders in each cluster frame the phenomenon that is investigated. Examining stakeholders' first-level interpretations within each cluster generates a more holistic understanding of the phenomenon and lends credence and depth to the study, while at the same time improving the “transferability” of the outcomes to other, similar contexts.

Application

A study by Boris Brummans, Linda Putnam, Barbara Gray, Ralph Hanke, Roy Lewicki, and Carolyn Wiethoff provides an example of the use of communicative framing analysis. The authors used this procedure to examine how disputants from different stakeholder groups (e.g., farmers, businesspeople, and activists) involved in one of four different intractable environmental conflicts clustered together because they foregrounded similar aspects in their definitions of their conflict situations. The study details the various steps involved in this kind of analysis, entailing the purposive sampling of research participants from the different cases and their classification into stakeholder groups (e.g., farmers, businesspeople, activists); the conduct of semistructured interviews to elicit stakeholders' accounts; the collection of relevant archival data to gain more in-depth insights into the cases; the transcription of the interviews and their open and axial coding to generate “framing categories” that surface regularly in participants' accounts and reveal the specific aspects highlighted by the research participants in their definitions of the situations (e.g., their own identity, the identity of others, power issues); the checking of these inductively derived categories against extant research literature; the conduct of a formal (quantitative) content analysis of the transcripts based on these framing categories; the use of this analysis's outcomes for the conduct of a cluster analysis to determine how research participants from different stakeholder groups form “natural” clusters across the cases based on their framing similarities as well as to determine the dominant framing patterns within each of the clusters; and, finally, the explication of these dominant patterns based on a re-analysis of the interview transcripts.

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