Framing Youth Development for Public Support E-Book

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Bildung
• Serie: J-B MHS Single Issue Mental Health Services
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 208

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

Since 1999, the nonprofit FrameWorks Institute has investigated howAmericans think about social issues--from children and youth toeducation and race--and how scientists, policy experts, andadvocates can do a better job of engaging the public in solutions.FrameWorks Institute's empirical approach integrates essentialconstructs from the cognitive and social sciences to investigatethe worldviews and patterns of thinking that ordinary people enlistwhen considering social problems. The goal of this approach is todeliver communications strategies that are grounded in research andhave the potential to change the public debate if they areeffectively deployed. This volume focuses on the theory, research, and practice ofFrameWorks' decade of work in evidence-based communicationsstrategies for child and youth issues. The articles explain wherethis approach is situated within the broader conversation oncommunications for social change; why an iterative, multimethodprocess is necessary to determine the communications strategiesthat will elevate the public dimensions of children's and youth'sdevelopmental trajectories; and how experts and advocates areapplying these evidence-based communications strategies to theirwork on behalf of children and youth. This is the 124th volume of New Directions for YouthDevelopment, the Jossey-Bass quarterly report seriesdedicated to bringing together everyone concerned with helpingyoung people, including scholars, practitioners, and people fromdifferent disciplines and professions. The result is a uniqueresource presenting thoughtful, multi-faceted approaches to helpingour youth develop into responsible, stable, well-roundedcitizens.

Leseprobe

Contents

Issue Editor’s Notes

Executive Summary

Chapter 1: The trouble with issues: The case for intentional framing

The pictures in people’s heads

What is wrong with this picture?

Reframing as lens cleansing

Chapter 2: Strategic Frame Analysis: Providing the “evidence” for evidence-based communications

Phase I: Pump the swamp

Phase II: Map the gap

Phase III: Expose and close the holes

Phase IV: Reframe the blame

Phase V: Seal the deal

Conclusion

Chapter 3: The family bubble, achievement gap, and development as competition: Media frames on youth

The family bubble frame

The achievement gap frame

The youth development as competitive race frame

Conclusion

Chapter 4: Mapping cultural models and translating expert explanations of child development with simplifying models

Culture and mental models

From understanding models to strategic framing

Conclusion

Chapter 5: From focus groups to peer discourse sessions: The evolution of a method to capture language, meaning, and negotiation

Cultural models and their traveling power in peer discourse sessions

The evolution of a method to capture language, meaning, and negotiation

Peer discourse sessions in action

Conclusion

Chapter 6: Who says your frames are better than mine? Making the case for strategic framing by using the power of experimental research

How social experiments are used to illuminate frame effects

Reasons to use experimental research to illuminate frame effects

Experimental research in action: Early childhood development

Chapter 7: From research to practice: Communications for social change

Chapter 8: Framing in the field: A case study

Chapter 9: Campaigning for children’s oral health: A case study

Developing the campaign

Watch Your Mouth

Results

Conclusion

Chapter 10: Strategic Framing Study Circles: Toward a gold standard of framing pedagogy

Chapter 11: Embracing the long view: A funder’s perspective on Strategic Frame Analysis

Chapter 12: Lessons from the story of early child development: Domain decisions and framing youth development

Level two considerations in the framing of child development

Implications for youth development practitioners

Index

Notes for Contributors

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.

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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.

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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

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.

Dale A. Blyth

University of Minnesota

Minneapolis, Minn.

Dante Cicchetti

University of Minnesota

Minneapolis, Minn.

William Damon

Stanford University

Palo Alto, Calif.

Goéry Delacoôte

At-Bristol Science Museum

Bristol, England

Felton Earls

Harvard Medical School

Boston, Mass.

Jacquelynne S. Eccles

University of Michigan

Ann Arbor, Mich.

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.

Richard Lerner

Tufts University

Medford, Mass.

Milbrey W. McLaughlin

Stanford University

Stanford, Calif.

Judy Nee

National AfterSchool Association

West Palm Beach, Fla.

Pedro Noguera

New York University

New York, N.Y.

Fritz Oser

University of Fribourg

Fribourg, Switzerland

Karen Pittman

The Forum for Youth Investment

Washington, D.C.

Jane Quinn

The Children’s Aid Society

New York, N.Y.

Jean Rhodes

University of Massachusetts, Boston

Boston, Mass.

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)

Issue Editor’s Notes

It is well established 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 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 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 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 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.

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 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 significantly 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 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.

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 full-fledged 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.

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.

Chapter 1

The trouble with issues: The case for intentional framing

Susan Nall Bales

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.

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

SCHEMA THEORY WOULD PREDICT 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 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