Volume VII, Number 1, Winter 2001

Issue Topic: Strategic Communications

Questions & Answers

A Conversation With Susan Nall Bales

Susan Nall Bales

Susan Bales is president of the FrameWorks Institute, a Washington, D.C. based nonprofit that conducts communications research on social issues, helping advocates apply research to public education campaigns. She and her colleagues at the Institute have been instrumental in developing strategic frame analysis, a new approach to communications research and practice. Prior to her work at FrameWorks, Bales served as director of strategic communications and children's issues at the Benton Foundation for six years and as VP for communications at the National Association of Children's Hospitals for four years. Bales also founded the Coalition for America's Children. A graduate of the University of California at Los Angeles, Bales received her MA degree from Middlebury College.

What is strategic frame analysis and how does it fit into an overall strategic communications approach?

I think doing communication strategically means recognizing that you come into an environment where people already have ways of understanding an issue, whether as a result of the way media framed it, from personal communication, or from cultural models that developed over time. You don't just walk out the door one day and say, “I have an issue that I want people to consider.” It's important to understand that the way people already perceive an issue is part of what you may be up against.

And so, step number one is to identify what people already bring to the conversation that you want to have with them; and secondly, to consider the implications of the way they understand an issue for their policy preferences.

The other important part of strategic communications is to bring a little bit more social science into the art of communications. And that means understanding that strategic communications is about three principles: agenda-setting, framing and priming. It's about whether your issue is on the public agenda and how the media participates in putting it on or off the public agenda; how the nature of the way the issue is framed by the media either contributes to or impedes your getting it on the public agenda; and finally, whether your issue becomes a lens through which people evaluate candidates for public office or how other issues can serve as a useful lens on your issue.

I think that those three principles—agenda-setting, framing and priming—that come out of the social science literature are absolutely pivotal for advocates to understand as they approach communication. We teach them in our trainings so that advocates have a vocabulary for, and a sensibility to, the processes of communication.

How does strategic framing fit in?

Well, framing is a concept that runs through the cognitive, social and behavioral sciences. For the work that my colleagues and I do, it allows us to bridge the difference among these various disciplines that study communications and policy preference, but have done so in isolation from each other. So, the great thing about the concept of framing is that, whether you're looking through the literature of anthropology, psychology, political science, linguistics or sociology, people have studied framing, and so it's a core concept.

Essentially, framing has to do with the way an issue is composed: the messengers, visuals and metaphors that are used to convey an idea. The cues that are given to people by the framing direct their reasoning about issues. Given this, it is vital that advocates understand the composition of the frame and what kinds of meta-messages or world views it calls into play. What we have tried to do in our work is to break down that frame; to deconstruct it and show people that, when you're talking about making news, you have a number of different variables you can manipulate. It's not just the message, it's the visual, metaphors and colorful language that are used. You can tell a story in many different ways and the more you know about which elements help and hurt your cause, the better you will be at telling a story about social policy.

Strategic frame analysis is really something that has been invented in the last five years by a group of communications scholars and practitioners getting together to compare the way that they look at communications. I would cite as part of that team, Frank Gilliam, with the Center for Communications and Community at UCLA; Meg Bostrum, a political strategist and public opinion expert, linguists George Lakoff at UC/Berkeley and Pamela Morgan, and Joseph Grady and Axel Aubrun, co-founders of Cultural Logic.

In my own work, as someone who's run communications campaigns for twenty-five years, I've tried to go back and develop a conversation between the various academic disciplines that ask how people think about social issues. I've added a more applied question, however: how can we change the communication in such a way that people will take another look at social problems? The result is strategic frame analysis, which is based in both theory and practice and attempts to continue that dialogue.

What are some examples of methods used in strategic frame analysis?

Traditionally, people have invested in focus groups or surveys to answer these questions. We like to use a technique called “elicitations,” which we find more useful in the early stages of an investigation. These are one-on-one interviews that allow people to talk about an issue while analysts look not so much for opinions as for the kind of models that they bring into the discussion to make sense of a particular issue. In talking about foreign policy, for example, do people really reason off of a “neighbor model”? In thinking about child care, do people see the day care center as an environment or a container?

Secondly, you have to understand the mediators, the places where people get their information on social issues. Increasingly, it's from local TV news. Understanding how the media tends to look at your issues is really important, and that doesn't take a lot of money to do. You know, you can do a pretty good content analysis by farming it out to people in your coalition and watching news for a week, taping it, and looking at how your issue plays out, if it's visible in any way. Or, following the work of the Center for Media and Public Affairs (www.cmpa.com) which tracks the media presentations of many social issues. I think any serious communicator on social issues should subscribe to their Media Monitor.

Our content analyses document the dominant frames of news coverage. But it's at this point, I think, that many people make a tactical mistake by attempting to mimic the news. They think, “If we could just get more news,” or, “if we could just get our spin inserted into that news, we'd be winning.” Instead, what you want to do is figure out how the dominant frames of news coverage are likely to affect public opinion and how you can change as many variables in the frame in order to get out a new message that is more likely to set up different policy preferences.

So we experiment with different elements of the frame and we manipulate those elements in experiments that Frank Gilliam conducts at UCLA. If you start using, for example, police officers to talk about early childhood education, or if you start using older people to talk about youth, will you get a different policy outcome? If you use the backdrop of the state capital to talk about children's oral health, will you cause people to say, “Wait a second. What does policy have to do with this? Why is this a legislative issue?”

Our methodology is divided between techniques we use to study and categorize the dominant frames that are currently affecting public understanding on a given issue, and then another set of techniques to determine whether our hypothetical “reframes” actually set up different policy choices. In essence, we've reconfigured the traditional investigation of “message” and added a number of new methods.

In recent years, we have seen personal stories used to emotionally impact audiences, with the intent of spurring policy change. Could you explain the difference between this approach to communications, which you define as episodic, and the more thematic approach? What kinds of policy results are achieved through each approach?

Our perspective on this point owes a great deal to the work of Shanto Iyengar at Stanford University.

The critical point is whether you can insert into the discussion of any given issue some contextualization, something that broadens the frame so that it isn't a single episode about a single person and a single trouble that afflicts them, which does not lead to public policy solutions. In the content analyses we've done lately on children's and youth issues over a six-week period, 97% of the coverage was episodic. What that means is that the coverage told the story of individual episodes that happened to individuals. These stories make no connection to causes or to consequences of those events.

So for a viewer that is not familiar with a particular social problem, what you see is a parade of individual stories that may be regrettable or might make you feel like somebody should do something. But it is more likely that you will write a check to a charity, if you do anything at all, and less likely that you will make the connection to policies that affect the conditions by which personal choices are constrained.

Alternatively, a thematic story looks at trends across time. It connects a current situation to what came before it, or it forecasts consequences. It tells a story in terms of the environment surrounding the person. It makes a link between conditions. And it helps people understand causality and the systems that determine outcomes.

So, for example, just to boil this down to essence, an episodic story would be about a violent child. A thematic story would be about the conditions in a neighborhood and what was available to a child other than violence. On this point, we have written a guide for advocates, outlining how to tell social policy stories in a different way, one that puts individuals in context and connects them to their environment.

When developing a message, how important is it to connect the particular problem to a possible solution?

Oh, absolutely important. Because one of the problems we see, and this is especially true of children's issues, is that people are firmly convinced that children are in trouble in America. But they don't think that there's anything that can be done about it, and they cannot name a single, positive solution to a children's problem that isn't about “fixing the parents.” They can't come up with a community that did something positive. And in fact, when you put in front of them, as we have in focus groups, examples of a problem that was solved, or a community that came together to tackle a problem, they love these kinds of stories!

I mean, it is an eye-opener, and it's very energizing to people to know that others are getting together and making some progress. There's some recent research that suggests that people really have a hard time identifying problems. They're better at coming up with solutions, once you've identified a problem for them. But they have a hard time being able to identify the problem itself. And so, the challenge in the frame is to help us orient the problem in such a way that the solution is inherent in it; that the systemic solution or the policy solution is set up because, without that prompt, the “default frame” is to fix the individual.

Marielle Bohan-Baker, Research Associate, HFRP