1.8 Framing and Social Policy

Profs Greer and Jarman discuss how issues are framed, how target groups are socially constructed, and the impact that this has on health outcomes. 

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• Music: 'Blippy Trance' by Kevin MacLeod

Transcript

Scott Greer: 0:11

Hi, I'm Professor Scott Greer. And welcome to the HMP governance lab podcast. Today I'm going to speak with Professor Holly Jarman about framing and social construction.

Holly Jarman: 0:22

Great. It's nice to be here with you, Scott. So which one do you want to talk about first framing or social construction?

Scott Greer: 0:29

Let's begin with framing because that's in a sense, an easier one. And people get it pretty quickly. But it taps into some deeper issues of social construction.

Holly Jarman: 0:38

Okay, I think that's good. So framing, the clue is in the name. And a lot of people get this idea pretty intuitively, I think, for that reason. So I want you to imagine that you're staring through a window. And so you're what you can see through the window is limited by the shape and size of that window, and you can't see anything around it. So you can't see things that are obscured by the walls, either side of the window. So imagine that window frame kind of metaphor. And then think about applying that to a policy area, for example. So this does feed in nicely from the things we've discussed in previous podcasts on particularly on agenda setting, in terms of we are can see things through the window, surrounded by the frame, but we can't see other parts of the problem potentially. And so when we talk about framing, or framing an issue, we're really talking about what does an individual or a group or society do to frame an issue in a particular way to obscure some parts of the issue? And to shape what an observer is seeing really around that topic? for it,

Scott Greer: 1:57

what would some framings, for example, be of gun violence, competing frames?

Holly Jarman: 2:01

Yeah, so gun violence is a good one, if you pay attention to what we take a look at in the news, what's in the news every day, we pay attention to some kinds of shootings, or some kinds of gun violence and not others. So take school shootings, for example. There are only one kind of gun violence. That happens in the United States, unfortunately. But we tend to focus on those a bit more. So they're definitely within the frame for how we as a society, and particularly in the media, and political elites, tend to talk about gun violence. And so there's this framing, to say, we must pay attention to these very serious incidents. And they are indeed very serious. But we're also skewing that with a discussion of kids and safety in schools. And we're kind of it's an emotional framing in a way because it's feeding into people's concerns about a vulnerable group, which is their kids. Now, you might argue that when we think about gun violence, we are quite often looking through that window of information that we have stored away in our brains around school shootings, we not might not be paying attention to other kinds of mass shootings. So mass shootings are actually defined, as you may know, as shootings of four or more people at once. And so there were a lot of lower level smaller incidents that happen quite frequently in across the US, that can be called mass shootings. But we're not necessarily thinking of those when we invoke the topic of gun violence. So that's one way that framing really makes a difference in this area. I would say another one is really framing the issue around mental health. So then we're not talking about framing the problem so much as trying to frame the solution in certain ways. So you'll see that some opponents of gun control will quite often try to frame the issue of gun violence as an issue of how do we manage people are control people with mental health problems. And to my mind, that kind of frames the problem in one way, but then ignores some other potential issues. You know, shooters are not necessarily people with mental health issues. And so if you frame the problem is school shootings and you framed the solution in terms of mental health, that's a little different than framing the solution in terms of controls on gun availability and purchase just for people regardless of what their their mental health status is?

Scott Greer: 4:47

and running with guns. If you frame it as gun violence, are you necessarily including the enormous burden of suicide?

Holly Jarman: 4:56

Right? So it's interesting Though to feed into that to say, when people then think about gun violence, we're thinking about things that incidents we have heard of in the past. So I say to you, what's your opinion of gun violence, you might be conditioned by your media consumption, and by discussions in the public sphere, to think, oh, gun violence, that means mass shootings and mass school shootings, potentially, above all, you, your mind might not be going to the place of thinking about suicide, which is quite a different problem definition, isn't it? And it might lead to thinking about solutions in a different way. That's why framing is powerful, because we take our preconceived notions of an issue. And then the framing activities of individuals and groups that try to deliberately construct a frame or window frame around an issue in a particular way. those activities, and combined with our prior consumption of information, come together to say, to determine our reaction when someone says, What do you think about gun violence.

Scott Greer: 6:09

And framing unfortunately, is therefore not all powerful. So just like policy, entrepreneurs can't always make the sale. And they need to constantly be updating, not all ways to frame a policy issue take because they have to partly be lucky and partly rooted in different people's understanding of the world and in their media consumption. So a lot of political activity and activism is precisely about trying to figure out a way to frame an issue so that your solutions become more obviously good,

Holly Jarman: 6:40

right. So I get annoyed sometimes when people particularly sometimes in the public health sphere, I have to say I just think that if you frame the issue in the right way, you will get the policy result that you want. Whereas if you've been listening to our podcast, at least, and our discussion of agenda setting, in particular, you'll see that there's a lot that goes into actually getting the policy result that you want a lot of politics, a lot of different things that go to open up that window of opportunity, and then also go into determining the final policy. framing is one aspect of that, and we shouldn't think that it's a substitute necessarily for a lack of political support, or a lack of money resources is quite often a problem for not getting the policy that you want. framing can't necessarily fix that.

Scott Greer: 7:30

So for example, declaring that gun violence is a public health problem, or that police brutality is a public health problem might not work outside people who care about what public health problems are, you're not interested in what the APA declares to be a problem, then it'll just wash off you.

Holly Jarman: 7:49

So maybe one of the things you need to think about as an advocate for particular issues in whatever capacity you find yourself in is, how can you think about different audiences, and how they might react to different frames, and maybe have more than one framing targeted at different audience groups and aiming to persuade them? I think, in general, though, you should also be aware of some of the limitations of framing as a tool, that it won't work on everybody, it won't, not everyone will react in the same way to the frames that you choose. And there are other factors that are going to determine the policy outcome some of the time,

Scott Greer: 8:28

it's like a lot of things in politics where you have to do it. And you have to fight about frames, and you have to think about how frames are not advantageous for what you're trying to get done. You can't just drop out even if your framing isn't working, that just means you need to think of a new one. And part of the reason frames don't work is precisely that they're rooted in something much deeper, which is the social construction of populations of Who are we and Who are they? So tell me, Holly, what is social construction?

Holly Jarman: 8:57

Yeah, that was a good segue. So yeah, I think social construction, the reason why we put framing and social construction together as two issues that are closely related, is that some of the time the social construction of an issue, but in particular, the social construction of target populations around an issue. Sometimes the you can think of these as people who are in receipt of the policy or people that the policy is acting upon. Even those social constructions are very deeply embedded in people. So here, we're we're kind of talking about two distinct things. I should break down the phrase social construction, actually. So construction, meaning, the idea that we collectively construct meaning around certain things. So imagine, for example, what does it mean to be a woman. So this is a very pertinent issue in society right now. A can activist would argue that what it is to be a woman is collectively constructed through lots of different interactions, conversations, public conversations in the public sphere, that gradually define what it means to be a woman, and change what it means to be a woman over time. So that definition can change and is malleable. fit that with the word social, which emphasizes the interaction between people, and the kind of idea that this is a societal level thing, societal level conversation that we are in. So social construction.

Scott Greer: 10:41

And another example of this and an example of how people try to fight to change it is in the book, The remarkable rise of transgender rights, where the question they're asking is how trends how the United States made progress on transgender rights at all, and so quickly, and in a period when it's not clear that the country was otherwise moving left. And part of the answer lies in the expanding acronym LGBTQ, because you can trace the history from the 1980s, when getting lesbian attached to the gay rights movement was a victory and started to frame a common group of people who shared a common problem and a common set of oppressors. So we have LG, then be bisexual, t trans que quiere. The construction of this acronym is the social construction by the people involved, have a shared if not identity, at least a group with a set of problems and a basis for political mobilization. And so part of the story of how transgender rights began to take off in the United States is precisely that they began to work with LGBT LGBT movements, in order to start to expand into a particular definition of a group of people to socially construct themselves. And it took

Holly Jarman: 12:02

I think that's a really great example. Because then to come back to the concept of social construction. The reason why social construction of a group of people is important, is it comes back to that cognitive image that we have in our head. So it wasn't really so long ago, when if you said to somebody, what do you think about the LGBT movement, they might not know what that was. I feel like the construction of that acronym over time, has then changed people's conceptions that they have hold in their heads of what it means to be gay, for example. So I think that's really powerful. Because those conceptions that we have around identity, and other related issues in our heads, then impact our decision making in the political sphere and in Policymaking. So, when we talk about social construction, particularly the social construction of target populations, it becomes very important, what the public think about a particular group, as defined by the public conversation, and it becomes very important what elite decision makers who have the power to make policy think about a particular group. So then we kind of get into some positive sometimes, and sometimes negative constructions of particular groups that can stray away quite far from the factual realities of those groups, or indeed, the experiences of people in those groups. But then we're talking about, it's like a mental shortcut that people use in and that leaks into policymaking. And that can change the way that we treat groups within society and within policy as deserving or not deserving as heroic or not heroic. So in a lot of the discussion on social construction, it's about trying to figure out what those hidden assumptions are, what those stereotypes are, what those social constructions are of particular groups. And then what are the implications of that? How does that play into policy making? Because again, let's point out this is a different way of thinking about policymaking than thinking about the traditional approach that a lot of people get taught in class, which is evidence based policy and pile more evidence on to the debate in order to change people's opinions. Were actually saying there's some cognitive things here underlying people's choices in the policy realm. And those choices have consequences for health outcomes.

Scott Greer: 14:48

And to just take a nice little example of how the media social constructs target populations. There's a chain of studies in political science and sociology on what pictures illustrate what kinds of articles, and articles about poverty are disproportionately likely to be illustrated with pictures of black people in urban environments. The most common kind of poor person in the United States is actually a rural or urban white person. But they very rarely end up being the default illustration for a newspaper article about about poverty. And by the same token, when the Washington Post finally reported something, which is known if you read this kind of research, which is that actually, black men spend some more time doing parenting activities than men of other races, they framed it in the context of a heartwarming story about a social movement led by a black guy, and then carried on with their normal coverage of black families.

Holly Jarman: 15:47

Yeah, so I hope you can see by this example, how social constructions can sometimes be pernicious, I would give you the the positively constructed group on within society of veterans, how we think about veterans and their deservingness, for things like health care, comes into politics and policymaking a lot. Now, that social construction might be actually quite far from the realities of the VA and health care on the ground for veterans as they receive and perceive of it. So, you know, the the social construction kind of gets in the way there too, I think sometimes.

Scott Greer: 16:29

So there's a sense in which was software construction. There's two groups that constantly recur in the social construction of policies and politics. One of them is the target population. And frequently the target population is being defined in a way that they don't benefit from and wouldn't like. And the other is we, who are we? Are we the national political elite? Are we some stylized group of people of a certain income and lifestyle? Those are the two questions want to ask when we talk about a public policies who and whom,

Holly Jarman: 17:03

right. And which group? Do people think they belong to? all groups? What identities do they associate with themselves? And how do they perceive others. So this is very deeply rooted in sociology and the idea of in group and out group thinking, and belonging in that sense. So that's very relevant. You don't put away your identities when you become a politician. When you become a media spokesperson, when you become an advocate, professionally, those things you carry with you. And so paying attention to what those people are saying. And some of the ways they might be thinking if you can identify those is very important.

Scott Greer: 17:48

And in times of stress, people frequently double down on at least their own sense of personal identity. I think those are the key topics. So some takeaways. One of them is framing this constantly attempted political act, which is really important. And that skill that you should take away is not just how do I frame things, but how are things being framed in a way that shapes what I can suggest. If we define gun violence, as being about somebody shooting at somebody else, that's a different effect that makes it harder to talk about suicide. And there might be a case for reframing the issue as being about suicide. And then social construction above all of we, and of target populations.

Holly Jarman: 18:31

Yeah, so I think overall, my takeaways would be, think about your audience. If you're going to craft messaging for a particular audience, which is an act of framing, do think about how they might react to what you have to say, this doesn't mean change the change necessarily what you have to say, or somehow skew evidence, but it does mean just consider the way that you're thinking about framing the problem, the way you're talking about the problem. So, first of all, turn that scrutiny on your argument and your potential audience. And secondly, turn that scrutiny on yourself. I think it's easier to scrutinize an audience potentially if you also know what your own biases might be in this area. So both of those things are

Scott Greer: 19:22

top tips for me. And be aware that this stuff changes, I believe it was 1992 was the first year the ad had a net majority of Americans who said that interracial marriage was acceptable. And in 1992, the gay rights movement had just started to argue explicitly organizationally that gays and lesbians constituted a united group with a shared set of problems and possibly a shared identity concern. you fast forward to now, mixed race is a rapidly growing population in the census. And Canvas has a facility that allows me to identify how I wish to be expressed by gender pronoun Now. So these things change and it matters. And they change partly because of hard work.

Holly Jarman: 20:05

Yeah. Because advocates slowly over time have fought really hard to change, social construction to change to change the framing around particular issues.

Scott Greer: 20:15

Well, I think that covers a fairly big issue. We've knocked through much of society and politics.

Holly Jarman: 20:20

Yeah, that was a nice, brief one for you. Okay, so thank you so much for listening, and we'll see you next time. This was an HMP governance podcast. If you're interested in hearing about more of our research, come and visit us at www dot HMP governance lab.org or follow us on Twitter at HMP govlab.