The Frame Project has developed an original, complex methodology which combines established approaches from various linguistic and social scientific disciplines in an innovative way. The main challenge was to identify fine differences in political perception as methodologically accurate as possible, while crunching down big questions to something which can be empirically shown in the close reconstruction of cases. The research process runs through different stages, where each stage follows its own rationale, adapted to the research question and the object of study.
'Interpretive frames' is an influential theoretical concept in media studies to explain how people make sense of mediatized representations by recognizing familiar patterns from significant details of perceived information. In augmenting the concept with an interactionist component and reconstructive methods of Conversation Analysis (see Gotsbachner 2009) we used it to synthesize interactive assertions of frames in political discussions on the one side, and cognitive processes of political perception on the other. In the latter sense frames are important for how the public sees the world, because a dominant interpretive frame can "determine what counts as a fact and what arguments are taken to be relevant and compelling" (Schön/Rein 1994, 23; see also Lakoff 2004).
In data collection we tried to grasp the moment when media-consumers develop their own ideas from an abundance of contradictory representations and interpretations of a certain social problem: We replayed televised political panel discussions from the evening news of Austrian television (ORF) to a number of audience-groups from different social and political backgrounds shortly after the original braodcast. In such live-discussions politicians need to frame their representations in a very condensed form (normally in 10-12 minutes). This helped our research in bringing out their framing strategies more clearly. The manner in which different audience groups categorize and evaluate the new situation while drawing on the contradictory representations enabled us to observe their political perceptions in a way close to their everyday experiences. Our research design is therefore quite different from the laboratory experiments often used in the media-effects studies of social psychology.
Reception groups were studied in participants' own living rooms, in front of their own TV-sets, and if possible in a group of friends, relatives or family members with whom they normally watch television and talk about politics. After replaying the political discussion and prompting them to narrate what they have seen, and what they think about it, participants were animated to talk among themselves, without further questions by the interviewer, as 'non-directively organised Focus Group interviews'. The audio-recordings of these events therefore mirror the participants' own concerns, whatever is important to them in connection with the political debate, formulated in their own discursive repertoires, which they have habitualised within their peer-groups as close-to-experience ways of talking about politics.
To reconstruct the participants' perceptions in their own relevancies and interpretive repertoires we conducted sequential analyses looking closely at the interactive constitution of meaning and communicative action. Analyses were carried out in extensive data sessions within the research team, using our different readings and life-experiences as a heuristical resource and a check to compensate for individual blind spots. According to analytical procedures in the vein of ethnomethodological 'Gesprächsanalyse' (~Conversation Analysis) participants' own interpretations become accessible to analysis in the answers of group members to others, because they already contain an interpretation of what has been said before. Specific formulations or wordings draw on recurring and recognizable ways of speaking which carry certain propositional connotations. In this way one can also reconstruct what they themselves treat as evident and taken-for-granted, as the 'social knowledge' they make use of while making sense of a televised debate. The reconstruction of the interactive constitution of communicative action can also be used as a validity check, if the way how participants carry on discussing among themselves actually allows us to make verifiable statements about their relevancies and interpretive repertoires, or if their talk is distorted by competing activities (like the avoidance of conflictual topics).
Comparative analyses build on the preceding steps and assemble them on a higher level: An investigation of patterns of perception within, but more importantly across different audience groups. When analysing the televised political discussions in their own right (another of the preceding steps, see Gotsbachner 2008; 2009) we reconstruct the politicians' framings of the debate, divided into sub-frames and single propositions they refer to in support of their arguments. In order to be able to handle the rich reception-group-materials for comparison we use a software for computer-aided qualitative analysis: All frames, subframes and propositions from the TV-debates were allotted a separate code, and we codified every single occasion when participants from the reception groups referred to any of these, together with another code for the evaluative quality of references, i.e. either affirming, or rejecting/criticising or neutral. In that way we can access all sequences from the transcripts, where audience members talk about certain propositions or framings (or at least its propositional value) very easily, and examine every question arising from comparative analyses immediately on the original data. Even complex enquiries can be formulated, e.g. looking for patterns of perception where audience members ratify or support a framing or proposition of a politician they would not vote for, or would even regard as their political opponent.
The aim of comparative analyses is not the minute reconstruction of single cases any more, but to encompass social representations in their observable functions on a social level. What we regard as the strengths of the methodology can be utilized to a full extent by an appropriate theoretical sampling of the audience groups selected, examining specific political groups or socio-political milieux, and reconstructing what within certain communities of interpretation is looked at as 'dominant representation' or 'social knowledge'. These dominant representations and the way they are used nurture audiences' perceptions of televised political discussions and their various modes of perception of politics in general.