Tracking the Development of Media Frames within and across Policy Issues

Framing is a central concept in political communication and a powerful political tool. Thus, it is hugely important to understand: a) what frames are used to define specific issues, b) what general patterns are evidenced by the evolution of frames over time, and c) how frames diffuse, or spread, across policy areas and venues. These tasks also pose a serious challenge, thanks to the volume of text data, the dynamic nature of language, and the variance in applicable frames across issues (e.g., the ‘innocence ’ frame of the death penalty debate is not used in discussing smoking bans). We describe a project that advances framing research methodology in two ways. First, we present a unified coding scheme for content analysis across issues, whereby issue-specific frames (e.g., innocence) are nested within high-level dimensions (or frame types) that cross-cut issues (e.g., fairness). We call this the “Policy Frames Codebook ” with an eye toward doing for frame categorization across issues what the Policy Agendas Codebook has done for issue categorization across agendas. Second, we validate the policy frames coding scheme by applying it to news coverage of three issues—smoking, immigration, and same-sex marriage—i