In this article, Eric Haas introduces a set of tools commonly used in frame analysis, giving particular emphasis to the study of written text and the power of lists for shaping how a political issue is understood. Lists are a common and powerful way to promote a worldview. This is the first in a series of monthly discussions about tools and techniques used by Cognitive Policy Works staff to inform political and social change processes.
Tools for Frame Analysis
There are a number of tools for analyzing the frames we and others use automatically in thinking and communicating about issues that are important to us. They can be used in situations that concern politics, such as health care, education and the role of government, or in our private lives, like how we feel our should children behave.
The broad categories of analytic tool types include:
- Direct participant response analysis where people are engaged directly to study their responses to different frames. Examples include opinion polls and focus groups in the context of an advocacy campaign, and;
- Text analysis where written text is analyzed to deconstruct meanings that appear in print media. Examples are given below.
Text analysis can be broken down into two domains:
- Large-scale analysis targets a large data set to find recurring patterns in public discourse. Examples include looking for specific words or phrases across thousands of newspaper articles, TV shows or a year’s total of your organization’s press releases to identify competing narratives (in the press or internally within your organization) and measure how often they appear in the press or your publications over time.
- Close-text analysis dissects the language use in one or a small number of important documents to identify how a key actor is framing an issue. Examples include deconstruction of frames in the President’s State of Union address or prominent articles on an organization’s website.
Cognitive Policy Works (CPW) uses all these tools in its work, depending on an organization’s goals. For example, organizations can use an overview of the prominent understandings or different “common senses” around a specific political issue by society at large or among a target group, such as their state legislators, to determine the difference between these groups and their own understanding of the issue. Once they know this, then they can develop a strategy to effectively promote their positions to a large audience. To make this determination, CPW can do a large-scale text analysis of newspaper articles on the topic or analyze the websites and speeches of their state legislators. We might also combine one of these large-scale text analyses with a poll to compare the news or legislator results with the understandings of people in general.
Organizations are also interested in knowing the subtle structures of their own thinking and communications. This knowledge enables organizations to hone their thinking and more clearly present their ideas and positions to constituents. CPW can do a close-text analysis of a selection of an organization’s press releases or website content, to illuminate the implicit messages that their word choices reveal. We might then follow up on all these analyses with trainings to help the organization incorporate key insights into their everyday work, which often entails learning new techniques and – in some instances – subtle shifts in how the organization goes about its business.
We will describe more about the methods we use to serve clients in the coming months. For now, let’s look at one tool used in close-text analysis to reveal a hidden agenda.
How Lists Expand A Particular Meaning
In our inaugural tool description, we want to focus on close-text analysis and one specific language device, the list. The list is both commonly used and powerful for its ability to emphasize a particular perspective while marginalizing others. What is a list? Here’s a working definition:
A list is the sequencing of words together so that they brain automatically places all of them into the same category, with a presumed set of shared features that make all of them similar to each other.
Here is an example about education, taken from an article in the Boston Globe:
Education policy in the United States treats Americans as too incompetent to provide for their children’s schooling. Unlike food or clothing or health care — where the market generates lots of options and parents are free to choose among them — education is mostly supplied on the Soviet model: Schooling is “free,” but the schools are owned and operated by the state. A small fraction of parents pay to educate their children privately, but the great majority simply take what the state supplies.
The public education system is essentially a monopoly, and like most monopolies, it wastes money, performs indifferently, and doesn’t much care if its customers — American mothers and fathers — are satisfied. But give those mothers and fathers the same freedom of choice when it comes to their kids’ education that they have when it comes to their kids’ shoes or dinner, and all of that would change. (Jacoby, 2004, p. D11, bold added)
Proponents of market policies for education often use the list. Why? Because a list triggers your brain to connect the dots between the objects placed together by the characteristic suggested by the communicator (in this case, the article writer). Proponents of market policies want to promote interactive, semi-social goods (like education and health care) as if they are nothing more than commodities that follow the laws of consumer transactions. They seek to lump these public goods in the same category as shoes, televisions, and salad dressings (all of which are pretty interchangeable and it really makes no difference to the general prosperity which one is the rage).
Even more subtly, pro-market proponents want to present education as a purely individual decision: it’s not what choices society provides that matters, it’s what you choose to buy. The blame is on the parents, with no societal responsibility, for making bad parenting decisions. Following this logic further, the government would have little or no obligation to ensure that good schools were available to everyone, just like it has no obligation to ensure that good quality supermarkets are present in every neighborhood.
Of course, a long discussion like this is not enjoyable to read. It’s also unnecessary. Our brains do this automatically for us by reading the list: shoes + clothing + food +dinner + education.
So, what would a list look like that promotes strong government support for public schools in all neighborhoods? What if we listed schools with roads, electric power lines, the internet, mass transit, fire fighters, and national parks: all things that we need for us to prosper (electricity sure comes in handy); things that benefit us when they help our neighbors (my drive to work is better when more people take buses and the subway); and each requires large scale cooperation to be effective (what if fire fighters returned to being privately contracted to some but not all houses?).
Which list you put public schools in says a lot about your thinking. Your list also promotes a subtle, but strong, difference about what you say public schools are about and how they should be supported.
References
Haas, E. (2006). Civil right, noble cause, and Trojan Horse: News portrayals of vouchers and urban education, pp. 439 – 450. In J. Kincheloe, K. Hayes, K. Rose, & P. M. Anderson (Eds.), The Praeger Handbook of Urban Education, Volume II. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
Jacoby, J. (2004, May 30). Vouchers and equal education. Boston Globe, D11. Available on the web at http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2004/05/30/vouchers_and_equal_education/.
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Thanks for this, Eric. It's very practical.
The education list doesn't work for another reason. The assumption in this list is that parents will, invariably, choose better for their children than other people will.
But, as any teacher can tell you, their classes are full of the chubby little offspring of overstressed or disorganized parents who are feeding them Happy Meals six days a week. And with one in four American kids living in poverty, there are a lot of parents who can't or don't provide adequate clothing, either. Whether it's a matter of can't or won't, it's clear that a lot of parents out there aren't, in fact, making superior choices on behalf of their kids.
Do we want these parents to be further burdened with furnishing their kids' educations, when they can barely keep up with supplying far more basic needs? Are we willing to live with the consequences of this kind of misguided "individualism" 20 years down the road?
One of the great challenges progressives face right now is changing the frame that the government budget is just like the family budget; and move it back toward the idea that we have a common future that we must invest in together. When every kid gets a decent education, regardless of his or her family's situation, we're ensuring that more of our collective talent gets put to work. And we all get richer — both culturally and economically — for a long time ahead. But when we fail in this, we create a permanent underclass, with generations of families that don't value education.
There's no question that our schools are already failing our kids, and are in desperate need of an overhaul. But progressives shouldn't abandon the basic ideal of a free, comprehensive public education for every American kid, regardless of family background, quality of parents, or ability to pay.
Thanks, Sara. Your comment is exactly right about both the value of public education and the additional burden that a purely individualistic society (if that's not contradictory) puts on many families, whether it is education, health care, etc. That is part of the power of a list in a political argument: it doesn't have to match the real world for it to make sense in the text and influence our thinking.
Thank you for this vital review of textual analysis and presentation. I am especially grateful for the updated vocabulary.
During my 30-year newspaper career I often covered the perennially explosive topic of public school reform, which makes your "education" example particularly thought-provoking, not the least in its implicit confirmation that many school-reform opponents (e.g., the John Birch Society) have formal training in the classical techniques of agitation and propaganda or — as the U.S. government labels it — "psychological warfare."
That said, I remain dismayed at CPW's ongoing aversion to forthrightly admitting that the true source of our problems whether national or global is capitalism: infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue.
Just as gainful employment can never be created from the permanent joblessness of an outsourced economy, so will humanitarianism never arise from the limitless selfishness of capitalism. In either case this is a condition equivalent to absolute zero — whether an economy reduced to irremediable ruin or a national psyche deliberately reshaped to replicate the ignorance, moral imbecility and theocratic fanaticism of the most dependably reactionary factions of Tsarist Russia — which in either case, economically or psychologically, are (by definition) incapable of producing anything greater than themselves.
The solution – if indeed we are not already hopelessly imprisoned in the slave pens of the Big Plantation of the United Estates of American Capitalism – is to resurrect the mostly-unspoken core principle of the New Deal: that capitalism, though genuinely evil, is nevertheless essential to channel into beneficial productivity the darker compulsions of our present stage of consciousness.
This leads to a direct analogy between capitalism and nuclear energy: forcefully confined (as in a reactor or a properly unforgiving regulatory structure), each can (presumably) be harnessed for our collective good.
Allowed to run amok, the result is invariably Chernobyl — whether measured by Geiger counters or the class-war atrocities of Jobless Recovery.
As to the condition of our collective psyche, I share the growing conviction of a number of environmental scientists and Eastern European archaeologists: that the First Ancestor of our present-day crisis is patriarchy; that its philosophical genetics decree its descendants bear increasingly deadly concentrations of its ecocidal taint (hence the progressively intensified savageries of Christianity, Islam and capitalism); and that the apex of civilization – indeed the last true civilization of Planet Earth – was the one centered on lost but ever-more-obviously glorious Knossos.
While I long ago concluded the Politics of Hope is but an especially cruel version of Pie-in-the-Sky and “change we can believe in” merely a maliciously clever Big Lie, I nevertheless also hold to the Sartre/Camus paradox – evolved in the French Resistance and echoed via desperate 12-step efforts to resurrect the American Dream – that our recognition of powerlessness is the essential precondition of empowerment.
Plagued by computer problems for the past nine days, I accidentally dropped my final sentence:
Hence the enormous usefulness of the tools discussed in "Close-Text Analysis," for which again my thanks.